Sierra V. Fedorko

Growing more than flowers this year. ♥️ My husband and I are due with our fourth baby October 2026.

When I tell you this year has been wild, I mean it. We got a puppy in the New Year expecting that alone to be our big news of 2026. (And maybe some baby goats for the spring but we’ve stalled on that front.😭)

But mid/late February rolled around and everyone but my husband was hit hard with the fever/body aches. I told Ben, “One day life will feel normal again.” (How little I knew what was coming!)

My youngest Sylvia suffered the worst of all and the day before we would begin the crescendo of doctor appointments, the ER, and UC Davis, I found out I was pregnant. Oh and our van was in the shop with transmission problems just for kicks and giggles, haha.

By early March Sylvia was in a bad way, and I told the doctors more than once, “I can’t tell you how odd it is for her to be like this. She’s usually so happy.” And that was the scary part. After her viral chest infection + double ear infection, she just didn’t get better. She was beginning to lose milestones and grow despondent.

So when I was 7 1/2 weeks pregnant we found ourselves at UC Davis while Sylvia underwent as many tests as it would take to get to the bottom of her illness. Everyone there was so glad we brought her in and it was reaffirming to hear our concerns validated by medical professionals. We didn’t have to fight to be heard. We were believed. And we were helped.

Before UC Davis, these had been unsettling weeks watching our little girl decline and being early pregnant with our 4th baby. I was wrestling with my early trimester fears and overwhelmed to tears driving away from the doctor’s appointment where we realized we needed to get further testing at UC for Sylvia.

The day before heading to UC Davis, I had been praying to the Lord, and I was absolutely overcome. Afraid my first ultrasound would show no baby and even if there was a baby, would there be a heartbeat? I wrote in my prayer, “I honestly don’t know how to trust you.”

To which I believe the Holy Spirit prompted,

Be in my Presence.

I think that is the practical act of trusting— simply being in the Presence of the Lord. So I continued to pray and by the end I was writing,

“But here we are by the wisdom of God and that is the comfort I see.”

That phrase, “I am here by the wisdom of God” (plus all the prayers of our church family) carried me peacefully through the next day at UC Davis. And that phrase, “I am here by the wisdom of God” continued to uphold me in the days before my first ultrasound.

Thanks be to God, the answers to Sylvia’s steady decline were simple, fixable, and not life-threatening, though a long road of recovery yet remained. I saw a healthy 9 week 1 day baby wiggling on the ultrasound screen with a beautiful heartbeat.

The days to follow would continue to be long and hard. I still felt some question marks for Sylvia (which were soon all resolved) and I was still terribly sick in the first trimester trying to keep the ship right and the kids fed and the laundry done. What would I do without Ben? My husband has and continues to shoulder a lot of the weight in our life season.

Until early April I didn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. It was coming–I believed. But I couldn’t see it yet.

Then I had a couple of days with some relief from morning sickness and our Sylvia started grinning again and the sparkle was returning to her eyes. I was helping her build back muscle and fostering her desire to play again. In the garden roses were blooming and we had just planted a bunch of wildflowers. There were glimmers.

Physically I am still often pretty miserable. I usually stay quite sick all the way through my pregnancies.

But as the world turns to true spring so does our life season.

It doesn’t always work out that way, I understand. But even in the dreadful thick of it, I took to heart the beautiful things happening around me while my head barely stayed above the surface. But my burdens have eased considerably these last couple of weeks and I am so grateful for the relief, the muscles in my soul a little bit stronger having felt the weight of my unknowns in the Presence of my Lord.

Overall I can’t say I did a very good job at surrendering but when it came to the day at UC Davis I was at peace and when it came to the minutes leading up to the ultrasound, I was surrendered and deeply okay. But maybe that had to do with crying to my midwife (who has been with me for all of my children) and telling her about Sylvia, my prayers to the Lord and how the Holy Spirit prompted me to be in His presence and how I was here by the wisdom of God, that I couldn’t control the life spans of my children, and that I would get through whatever happened with my community.

So anyway,

That’s where I’ve been. Growing a baby. Planting flowers. Praying out of desperation. In doctor’s offices. Looking at test results. Getting up late at night for many nights to help Sylvia. Sharing our happy news with friends and family and getting through each day by the grace and strength of God. And becoming more resilient as a mother and a woman.

I am very thankful but most of life this year has felt like a wildflower straining through the crack in the sidewalk. Beautiful, hard, and there. We are so looking forward to this baby in October and already trying to figure out names. (It gets tougher every time, heheee). And I am so glad I’ve got that light glimmering ever brighter at the end of the tunnel. This tunnel, anyway. 🙂 One tunnel at a time.

On the morning I’m finishing this blog post, a poem I wrote last year popped up in my Facebook memories. The entirety of it is rather long, but here’s a snippet I’ll share to celebrate that feeling of “light at the end of the tunnel.”

---

cheers to finding out so young
that you and you and you
and your dad
and this big, little life of ours
is the richest I could ever get,
that all the achievements and accolades
could never come close to this,
to lying in the garden grass
my children next to me
raising their lemonade,
“clink, clink”
enjoying it to the very last
drop.

so—

cheers to this and
cheers to that,
I’m having the time of my life
just cutting into sugary banana bread,
and poking a straw through a cardboard
juice box

for you and you and you.

I hear the birdsong like applause,
our laughter, the encore.

-S.V.F, Minute Made (whole poem here)

---

It looks like I need to add another you to that last little bit of the poem since our fourth baby is set to arrive late October.♥️

While life in 2026 certainly hasn’t felt like having the time of my life, I still hear the birdsong like applause and know that the good in the phrase the “good ole days” doesn’t have to be straightforward to be true. Life is not cut and dry, and I am thankful that the Lord God is in each of these days and that even when the end of a tunnel is nearly nonexistent my God exists and He is with me.

For however this spring finds you, I pray you find all your rest and peace and hope in the Lord. And even if life is not serene may you hear comfort in the sound of birdsong, in the way God is making the physical world beautiful again. Will He not also make it well with your soul?

(He will.)

Thank you for being here and letting me share my faith and my heart with you! There are more stories and more roses and more poems to come, and I look forward to writing those on the blog. As they come.

One day at a time.♥️

🌻Sierra