The Most Deserving Mom of 2015 —Nicole Hall
July 02, 2015
Posted By: Shaunescy
WRITTEN BY ELEONORE SNOW | PHOTOS BY AMELIA ANNE PHOTOGRAPHY
As with so many things in life, the only certainty about the journey of parenthood is that nothing is certain. Just ask Nicole Hall. Nicole and her husband, Michael, struggled for 11 years to get pregnant – but once their baby boy, Jared, decided he was ready to meet them, he wasted no time whatsoever. Nicole’s labor lasted only 36 minutes before she was able to hold her miracle baby after all those years of waiting. Now, Jared is a healthy, happy 10-month-old who is the light of his parents’ lives, and his mom is this year’s Best Mom Under the Big Sky.
Funnily enough, Nicole is so deserving of this honor that she was nominated by two different people who didn’t even realize that the other had entered her in the contest. Unbeknownst to Nicole, both her husband and her niece came into the Gallatin Valley Mall to fill out the application about Nicole and why she should be this year’s winning mom.
Because Michael is in the military and travels overseas for months at a time, he and Nicole never really leave each other’s side when he’s in town. So when she found out that he’d entered her in the contest, she asked him, “We’re always together – how in the world did you do that?” He told her that he and Jared did it while she was getting a pedicure one day in April. And then he went back overseas right after Easter. Thankfully, Nicole has family nearby, including her mom, Elaine, who happily strolled her grandson around the mall on a recent Thursday, while Nicole got some well-deserved pampering for winning the contest. Nicole’s prizes included a $500 Gallatin Valley Mall shopping spree, a Macy’s makeup makeover, a manicure and pedicure at LeNails, a designer diaper bag from Bibs and Binkies, a hairstyling session and Professional Royale Hair Straightener from Hairstyler, two premium cool comfort bamboo pillows courtesy of Bamboo Pillow and a photo shoot by Amelia Anne Photography. And thanks to technology, Jared gets to see and talk to his dad every day using FaceTime.
After the years of infertility struggles and disappointment, Nicole is very honest about the sometimes-agonizing journey that she and Michael took to get pregnant. “Military doctors aren’t always steady,” she explains, “And so it was hard to get consistent care.” For a while, the Halls stopped trying. “You give up hope every time it doesn’t work; you think it’s never going to happen,” Nicole remembers.
When the Halls moved to Bozeman, Nicole met a doctor who was studying fertility. First they tried intra-uterine insemination, but Nicole’s body didn’t respond, so they stopped. “I cried, of course,” she recalls. Then they turned to in vitro fertilization (IVF). “It’s not cheap,” Nicole admits. “But when it’s something that you want, you save.” Luckily for the Halls, IVF worked the first time and they have three more frozen embryos. They will be trying for baby number two in June.
Nicole is proud to admit that Jared is an IVF baby. She credits all of the amazing staff at Dr. Stacy Shomento’s office at Bozeman Deaconess and is extremely thankful about how comfortable they made her feel during the sometimes-invasive process of IVF.
“There are a lot of infertile people,” Nicole says. “And we all think we’re alone. But we’re not.” After all the years of waiting for “those two pink lines,” Nicole advises others struggling with infertility to pray. “It’s worth the wait,” she says. “Like my mom said, maybe this is how it was supposed to happen.”
Like most working single moms, Eleonore Snow runs full speed at all times and sometimes goes to the store to buy milk for her kids and comes home with only wine for herself. You can judge her, it’s OK.
