Another Sign

I'm feeling slightly better after 24 hours of antibiotics, so I figured I'd share my other experience with signs as promised. I'm fighting with blogger to get my photos and text to format the way I want. I'm just going to have to give up and accept it as it is. You can still follow me, right? Good.

As I said in my last post, I now believe in signs. For example, if I am speeding and then pass a cop without getting pulled over, I look at it as a sign. I should slow down. This was my free pass. The next time I won't be so lucky. I try to pay attention.

After we lost Noah we were understandably frustrated with our struggles. After such a long battle with infertility, we had been given a peek into the excitement and promise of early pregnancy only to have it taken away. After we lost our little boy, my father-in-law purchased small pewter pins of a baby's footprint for us. He was also wearing one of these pins on his lapel. He told us that the pins were to be worn as a reminder of our little boy who will never be forgotten. It was very nice of him to think of us like that.



We started back into fertility treatments not long after Noah was gone, but we needed some encouragement. It was during this time that I noticed a large smudge on our bathroom mirror when it would steam up. I'm a clean person, but my house is not immaculate. I looked at the smudge for several weeks and didn't think anything of it until one day when my husband vocalized his awareness of said smudge. His assessment was that it looked like a baby's footprint. Sure enough when I took my next shower I did take notice of it's curious shape. While it wasn't a perfect footprint by any means, it did look quite similar to a foot with toes.

I cleaned the house a few days later and reminded myself to clean the mirror to wipe away our little footprint-shaped smudge, but the next time I took a shower, it reappeared. "Darn." I thought, "I missed it! I need to clean more thoroughly next time!" Several more attempts were made to clear the footprint from our mirror to no avail. I told my husband that it wouldn't go away, so we scrubbed it as hard as we could. No luck.


I commented to my husband that it might be some kind of encouragement from beyond. Believe what you want. Maybe I was reading into something because I needed hope. I'm ok with that. I think we need to find hope with any source we can - real or imagined. Regardless of it's true origin, I began to look at the footprint as an sign that the family we had imagined would become a reality if we would only keep faith. It was so curious to me that I actually attempted to document it in pictures. (By this time I was a firm believer in signs, and I knew it would be a good story in my future child's baby book.) I could even kind of line it up with my belly depending on where I was standing.

What became of my footprint? It hung around for quite some time, but it disappeared shortly after we discovered we had successfully conceived again. It was around long enough to keep me going. Was it a sign? To me it was. That's all that matters. Take a look at the pictures. Can you see my smudge? Does it look like a footprint?

Whenever I see the people on the news who claim to see Jesus in their toast I have to chuckle. It might sound crazy to some people, but if it gives hope to even one person, I can appreciate it.