Help Us Adopt: From Baby Loss To Renewed Hope

Hi, We’re Thomas, Ashley, and we have a 6 year-old son. We are asking for donations to bring a baby into our family. Please read our story below and donate and share if you feel the call.

When Thomas and I met, it was a whirlwind relationship. It felt like such a fairy tale - I was in New York City working as a celebrity producer on a talk show for NBC and he was in Nova Scotia in between TV jobs. On our third day of talking to each other he sent me a photo of what our future baby would look like. My friends said that was definitely a “red flag” but I ignored them. Six months later we were married and pregnant with our first child!

Both of us were raised as only children and we dreamed of big families like the Brady’s, the Camdens, or the Kardashians and we were absolutely thrilled to be expanding our family. We spent weeks dreaming about our baby and naming them. But 12 weeks into the pregnancy it ended in a miscarriage and a D&C.

We soothed ourselves with late night snacking and watching Coach Taylor’s pep talks on the series Friday Night Lights. We got tattoos, we moved to the south, and we just continued hoping for a baby.

The following year after what seemed like forever, we welcomed a perfect baby boy!

The delivery was rough though. I experienced an emergency c-section, and an emergency postpartum bleed. I along with our new bundle spent 10 days in the hospital and NICU recovering.

It was such a difficult birth that we waited until he was 2 years old to try to expand our family again.

We went through multiple miscarriages. Too many to keep track of. On our son’s 4th birthday at Disney World Thomas had just shared with our friends we were having a baby. I went into the bathroom and saw I was having a miscarriage. The show must go on though and we continued on at Disney for our son.

Three full years after trying to get pregnant, we finally did it. In the beginning around 7 weeks I started bleeding and was ready to call it a day with a bottle of wine. But something within me told me to wait on that. At the hospital the next day I saw a strong beating heart and I cried. This little baby beat the odds. Thomas and I wanted a strong name for this baby and we immediately decided on Ocean.

It was 2020 and we felt blissful with our little secret. On a trip to Florida, my best friend Becky Facetimed us to do a gender reveal (she had called my OBGYN ahead of time). We were beyond thrilled to find out we were having a girl and we announced it on social media.

As my belly grew and we felt Ocean’s little kicks we imagined our future. Our son was excited to be having a “daughter” and he talked about her everyday.

I squeezed into a cute leopard print dress that perfectly showed off my belly for our obgyn visit. There we saw her perfect little body. Every inch of her was just perfection. It was a joyous moment filled with small talk and banter with the nurses. We recorded the visit and we recorded the sound of her heartbeat and put it in a dinosaur stuffie for our son. He was ready to be a big brother.

Around 7 months into my pregnancy I noticed I wasn’t feeling Ocean move around as much as I normally did. I texted my doula and told her about the lack of movement. She said if she was able to, she'd come by with a doppler to check on Ocean. She never got around to it. I also emailed my obgyn. It was my second baby and I was trying to be super chill about it all. So when my OBGYN suggested I just wait until my doctor appointment in a few days, I took a hot bath and waited it out.

A few days later we kissed our son goodbye and headed to the obgyn leaving him in my father’s care. At the appointment we went into the office to listen to Ocean’s heartbeat. They couldn’t find it. I knew. I knew immediately that she was gone. We went to look at her with a sonogram and I will never forget her perfect little slumped body at the bottom of my belly. It was the worst moment of our life.

And yet it got worse. I had to go to the hospital and give birth. Or as I just say, “deliver her”. At the moment I was focused on what I needed to do. I delivered her and I was grateful to have that experience with her.

At the same time though I was bleeding heavily and when the doctor tried pulling out my placenta with her hands, the bleeding got worse, my blood pressure dropped, and it became an emergency situation. I went into emergency surgery, and I really thought I would die. Thomas and my doula were by my side the entire time. Ocean was delivered on 9/10/20.

Our baby Ocean died from a small placenta. She was in fact perfect but her placenta was too small to continue giving her the nutrients she needed to continue growing. It’s the number one cause in stillborn babies. Her death could have been prevented by simply monitoring her placenta growth at my regular appointments. It’s easy to do and should be standard. But it’s not. She could have survived had we known about measuring the placenta and stillborn prevention. That in itself is a pain that I hope nobody ever experiences.

Our friends and community swooped in to take care of us. My goodness, I know why people love the south so much. The sense of community spirit and how people take care of their neighbors is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced. It got us through those first 7 months which were brutal. We are forever grateful to them in that moment of time.

As I’m sure you can imagine, we felt sick with loss, I felt constant panic that my daughter was missing, and our family felt incomplete. My son had trouble wrapping his head around why his mummy went into the hospital with a baby, and all he got out of it was a stuffed animal with wings (which we still cuddle with today).

Our son asks us daily to please give him a daughter or a brother. Daily he says, “when my sister comes” or “when my brother comes”.

We tried for three more years to have another baby. We had another miscarriage or two, and along the way, I had appointments with top doctors at Yale and Atlanta.

Our dream of getting pregnant has ended though. Recently at a fertility specialist appointment, I was advised that my chance of surviving a third birth is low due to my medical issues in birth.

We have always wanted a full family and adoption has always been a conversation. Infact, we started the process last year and put it on pause when the funding of our business that employed eight others fell through and unexpectedly shut down. Then the actors and writers strike happened and we had to use our entire savings to get through that financially difficult time.

This is why we’re turning to our community once again and asking for help. We are asking for a donation - a donation of any amount.

The cost of adopting is 20-50K and it goes to expenses like legal fees, home studies, travel and lodging, court fees, and medical and living expenses for the mom giving birth.

We have such an enormous hole in our heart and so much love to give a baby that we’re not letting finances stop us from achieving our dream of giving our son a brother or sister and giving a beautiful baby a home.

We plan to share all of our updates with you here. We have already started the home study process and picked an amazing agency where we will start meeting prospective mothers soon. We’ve already started receiving adoption bills and are urgently raising the money so that we can make the first payment to our adoption agency. They won’t present our family to the pregnant mamas until we do that.

Here is the cost breakdown of what we need to raise and how the money will be used:

 $5,000 - Application Fee  $10,000 - This is the fee to officially go live on our website. Paid in one lump sum of $15,000 

$15,000 -fee for finalization to be paid after placement occurs. 

 Additional Fees (None of these can be guaranteed fees as they are going to fluctuate depending on where your birth parent is from) -Birth parent living expenses ($0-$10,000+) -Legal fees ($3,500-$15,000+) -Medical fees (Both birth parent and baby - $0-$10,000+

If you feel compelled to donate we will forever be grateful. If you’re unable to donate, sharing our story and the gofundme link is also a huge help.

We have faith that we’ll be bringing home our new baby soon.

With love - Thomas & Ashley (and our son )