Busy Life as a Mother of Three!

Wow! Life has been busy, busy! I can hardly believe that our sweet Joanna is already 8 weeks old and on Friday she will be two months old. Life is flying by so fast. I feel extremely exhausted and I'm pretty sure that I could sleep for an entire day straight, but I'm still very thankful that we have our sweet little one to take care of and a house that we are making into a home... :) It is all totally worth the exhaustion! A few weeks ago I was able to have my first 45 minutes to myself without anything to do, so I went to our favorite coffee shop in Old Towne Arvada near us and had a wonderful time journaling, drinking a Lavender Freeze, and eating a slice of amazing homemade apple pie! It was an amazing time! I wanted to share some of what I had written while journaling, but my journal is in our room which happens to be where Joanna is sleeping right now so I don't even want to chance waking her up! So I will be my random self and share whatever else right now even thought it's almost 10 p.m. and I feel like sleeping! 

I am absolutely loving our new home. I'm in the process of going through paint samples trying to decide what to paint all of the rooms upstairs. Right now there is white paint on all the walls which is okay since it makes everything very bright, but I love more color even if it's just a cream or tan. We leave to go camping on Wednesday in Lake City with my parents and Lelia, Wayne, and niece, Vienna. But when we get back we have a few weeks to focus on painting and decorating our home, finally! I really can hardly believe I haven't put any pictures on the walls, yet! This is coming from the girl who always had pictures up on most of the walls by the first or second week at our last few homes! I am definitely enjoying looking at Pinterest for ideas of paint colors and decorations, and I'm very excited that we actually have lots of walls in this house and so many great areas to put cool decorations or crafts that I can make! 

We just got back from Steamboat Springs a few days ago where we spent three days with Jesse and Rhonda's family at the missionary housing up there. It was SO much fun fishing, playing miniature golf, going to the candy store in town, and spending time visiting! Our kids had a wonderful time fishing. Scott was amazing and held Joanna in her front pack almost each time we fished. While he fished with her I was able to watch the older kids fish. I am amazed again and again by how fast Lydia picks up on things! (The other week while Scott and I cleaned out his garage with Joanna in the front pack again, Daniel and Lydia rode their tricycles around and around Scott's truck in the driveway. At the beginning Lydia was just scooting the tricycle along with her feet and by the end of the morning of riding 2 to 3 hours, she was pedaling crazy fast around the turns and everything!) The first morning we went out to fish, Lydia was trying to cast like Daniel but she definitely couldn't get it to cast out far... By that afternoon after naps, she was casting just as far as Daniel (and further than I could even cast their fishing poles most of the time)! Daniel was fishing with a hook and lure this time but never caught a fish which was sad... :( He was a good sport with it, though, and even though he was disappointed, he was also really excited for the other guys who all ended up catching at least one that week. He was so dedicated, though, and seriously kept fishing for hours at a time even though all the other kids would stop quite often and play around for awhile.

Wednesday we will be headed over to Lake City, CO for our yearly camping trip with my parents! So excited to go to Lake City. Still one of our favorite places to go camping and it feels like home in a lot of ways after going there so many times in the past 5 years since our honeymoon there and all growing up for me. The kids are beyond excited to go camping and I'm excited to take Joanna on her first camping trip! At least we have our pop-up camper because that will help us stay nice and warm and I'm praying that Joanna sleeps really well at night there like she has been lately!

There are so many other things I would love to share, but I seriously need to get to sleep now. Little by little I'll try to share more on here in the midst of life's craziness! 

Happy 1st Month Joanna!!

Dear Joanna,

Hi sweet girl! You are 1 month and 1 week old today. We are headed home from your first big trip! We spent the past five days in Delta and Grand Junction visiting family and friends. You were able to see Pappy, Maw-Maw, Uncle Wayne, Aunt Lelia, Aunt Amanda, and cousin Vienna again which was so much fun and you were able to meet your other practically family members - David, Jessica, Lillie, Drew, and Andrea. You did great on the 5 hour trip over and hopefully will do ok on the way back even though you are screaming your head off right now. :( Basically you love your car seat if you are asleep when we put you in it or if you are rocked to sleep in it but otherwise it is not your favorite place to be and you let us know! Poor girl...

You really enjoyed having all the family spend time holding you this weekend! And we had family pictures taken yesterday with Pappy, Maw-maw, and everyone. So excited to see them and I'm so glad you were in them sweetie! :)

You have had such a big first month of life! You spent your first few weeks of life getting to know your two favorite little people who happen to be your brother, Daniel, and your sister, Lydia. Daddy was able to take most of the first few weeks off work which was so nice and Maw-Maw stayed past your delivery to help with things and hold you whenever she could for the next two weeks. You were, and have been, a lot more fussy than your sister was... Much more like Daniel was as a newborn. :( So sad to hear but hopefully little by little things will get better and you start feeling better. But you do love being held! All day long for the most part! You have done pretty good most nights overall though. Almost completely since you were born you have gone at least 3 hours in between feedings at night and even though 4-5 hours in between is the normal at night, the first few nights at Pappy and Maw-Maw's you actually had 6 and even 7.5 hours in between! Yay! Mommy definitely enjoys getting extra sleep and since you seem to not have any problem with gaining weight, I'm totally ok with you getting more and more sleep at night!

Almost from the time we took you home from the hospital you were already spending time lifting up your head and looking around. You are doing better and better with that all the time and you just seem so proud if yourself!

Even though you dropped from your birth weight of 9 lbs 1 oz to 8 lbs 5 oz within 3 days which gave your pediatrician some concern, you greatly made up for that by gaining 6 oz back in 24 hours and then by 2 weeks you were up to 10 lbs 3 oz and in like the 98 percentile for weight I think. You are definitely getting enough milk from mommy and I'm so glad! Right now I have no clue how much you weigh... I'm pretty sure over 11 lbs at least though.

You love giving big smiles and have been especially the past few weeks! That and hearing you try to talk with your goos and baby talk is so cute!! :) As you little by little have more awake time it's just too cute having little "conversations" with you. Although you greatly like your sleep still and rarely stay awake longer than an hour or an hour and a half for feedings every 3 to 4 hours during the day.

Joanna, you are such a beautiful baby! Mommy loves your dark hair and I really hope it stays that way! I definitely believe we have the prettiest two daughters! :)

Oh yes! The other exciting news this month was that two weeks after you arrived we packed and moved into our new house! It's a wonderful house in Arvada and I'm so thankful we have it and that you are able to grow up in this house over the next few years at least! Right now you have been sleeping in your bassinet in mommy and daddy's room but soon you will probably move into the living room and then into your room with big sister once you start sleeping through the night! :) Hopefully that will be by July or August at least!

We love you so much sweet Joanna Beth! So glad you are here and part of our amazing family! Seeing Daniel with you is so adorable because he wants to help with anything he can and loves to check on you and tags care of you in any way that he can. Lydia I'm sure will be one of your best friends later in life because she just loves you so much and misses you so much whenever y'all are apart! She loves kissing and hugging you whenever she gets the chance. :)

Love you!

~Mommy

Joanna Beth's Birth Story

Finally getting Joanna's birth story written up! Took me awhile to write... little by little, but here it is as much as I can remember... :)

36 weeks - 38 weeks and 6 days:

As I had shared in an earlier blog post (I'm pretty sure), I woke up the morning I was 36 weeks and 2 days along to a lot of bleeding which freaked me out! I rushed to the midwife's office and after hours of monitoring, checking to see if my water had broken, and an ultrasound they were assured that baby Joanna was fine and were pretty positive it was just because of a sudden change of the cervix opening and not anything to do with the placenta. I was SO thankful to hear this even though I did feel a lot of kicking and movement from Joanna all morning so that made me feel much better and because I knew I was almost full-term so if they needed to get her out of me they could.

After spending most of the morning at the midwife's office that morning after all the bleeding, I ended up dilating from a 1 to a 3 while I was there and was having constant contractions lasting about a minute apart every 3 to 5 minutes so they ended up having me go to the hospital in case this was the day she was coming! Well, after six hours of trying to get things moving further along they checked dilation again and I was still a 3 and the contractions had greatly slowed down, so we were sent home to wait it out...

I spent the next two and a half weeks paying close attention to my contractions and getting ready for baby girl to arrive! My midwives told me each time I went in that they were pretty sure I would have a very fast labor once I went into it (because Daniel and Lydia's active labors were only 7 and 9 hours and Lydia came out so fast - in only two pushes), so I tried to be as prepared as possible to head to the hospital as soon as contractions were consistent and more intense. Night after night we made sure the dishes were done, house was picked up, and our bags were close to being fully packed before we headed to bed just in case that was the night... Well, by my 38th week the contractions had definitely slowed down a lot and I had several days with none at all which was nice and made me feel like Joanna wouldn't be showing up until her due date or after! Then, on Friday and Saturday morning, April 18th and 19th, I woke up with pretty bad cramping which made me think labor might be starting but then it stopped and it was just another day of not many contractions. Saturday evening I talked to my parents over the phone as we talked about Easter which was the next day and I told them that I had had the cramping but that I was pretty positive Joanna wouldn't be arriving until her due date the following week. Well, I was very wrong about that!

Saturday, April 19th

We had a wonderful day yard sale shopping and having some family time at our favorite coffee shop around here! I enjoyed my white chocolate chai frappe and just had a great time with the kids. The weirdest thing about the day was that I wasn't very hungry the entire day! I seriously only ate a few things and couldn't finish what I did have which was NOT the case before in this pregnancy! Lol. And Joanna was very quiet most of the evening... I remember having to spend a good 40 minutes or so trying to wake her up at one point to get her to move or kick. Waking her up before was always very easy! She finally moved around some which made me feel much better. I went to bed by 10 p.m. that night without having any consistent contractions that evening and I woke up right around 1:30 a.m. just minutes before my water broke! 

Sunday, April 20th

Having my water break right around 1:40 a.m. was a bit weird in itself because I had to have my water broken with both of our other kids late in my labor... I woke up thinking I had to pee so I was in the process of getting up (at that point in the pregnancy it was DEFINITELY a process to get out of bed - lol) and basically I didn't get out of bed because my water broke and all I have to say is the midwives were very truthful when they said I had a LOT of fluid! ;) I yelled at Scott to get out of bed telling him my water had broken and he cleaned up everything (he's awesome!) while I called the midwife and then my parents and Jesse and Rhonda. Jesse headed over to watch our kiddos and my parents left Delta within an hour. As we got ready to go I got more and more excited knowing that we were having our little girl at any moment and she would more than likely be an Easter baby! We got packed up and headed to Lutheran Hospital just minutes away from us. On the way over I had the first couple of stronger contractions since my water had broken. I thought that maybe this was "it" but that wasn't the case... We arrived, settled in, met our nurse, and the wait began.

There isn't a ton to share about the next 13 1/2 hours... The nurse checked my dilation by 3 a.m. and I was only between a 3 and 4. Scott and I spent time just resting while I was being monitored for awhile to check on baby and me. I had contractions from time to time but nothing very consistent and they didn't seem to be getting more intense at all as time passed. :( Mom and dad got to the hospital around 7:30 or 8 a.m. and we spent the next few hours switching between resting, walking laps around the floor, talking, and doing whatever else we could to get labor started. I had contractions that sometimes became consistent but then I would randomly have 15 to 30 minutes without one. It was all over the place. I even took a bath after my nurse and the midwife kept mentioning it over and over. I always wanted to try the bath at a more intense time in the labor but they were thinking having a change of pace might change up something but nope. Nothing got more intense, but it was a relaxing bath and at least I was able to try out the tub then since I definitely didn't get the chance once labor began... We ended up walking to other floors in the hospital and I watched as the rest ate a yummy lunch downstairs at the cafe. I was beyond starving by that point... The nurses and midwives were saying various things as to what I could eat since I hadn't officially started labor by then and finally they allowed me to eat some fruit and toast in addition to the Popsicles I had had off and on during the morning. Never knew toast and fruit could taste so good!

We also spent some time outside on a little patio area at the hospital which was nice and we spent a lot of time thinking about the wonderful Easter meals our families were enjoying. :) But it was all worth missing out on the meals! Finally, after doing what we could to get things going, my midwife, Jen, came in and checked my dilation again around 4 p.m. to see if anything had changed. I was a 4 by then which was not much of an encouragement! It had been around 14 hours by then since my water broke so she gave us some options... Basically we could either have her start inducing me with pitocin right then (which I was SO hoping not to have to do) or she said she'd give me until 8 p.m. to try to get things going on my own. If nothing was happening we'd have to automatically start the pitocin by then since they didn't want me going much past 24 hours after my water had broken before having to have a c-section. Scott and I talked with my parents and figured we would spent the next four hours trying all that we could to get things moving... I remember feeling a bit hopeless after she left because I felt like nothing we were doing was doing anything, but I got up and went to the bathroom to pee before we headed downstairs to walk up and down some stairs. In the bathroom I had two contractions that were definitely stronger than the previous ones but nothing too intense yet, so we went ahead and began our walk downstairs to the lobby stairs. It was around 4:30 when we were out in the hallway heading to the elevator and labor began. I seriously had contraction after contraction after contraction with maybe a minute between each one and they were crazy intense! We decided against the stairs (or my family decided against it because I can't even remember discussing it) and instead decided to walk around the hallway on the floor. But that didn't even happen because within 30 minutes or so I was crying through the contractions and was about ready to take a wheelchair back to our room because I felt like I would just be having Joanna out there! I remember telling my family that I felt like I had gone from no consistent contractions straight to transition. It was crazy!

I finally got back to my room and the next two hours were a whirlwind! The crazy part is that it felt like those two hours took about six hours to me and I felt like the contractions were never going to end... I remember asking for an epidural at least 3 or 4 times but no one even said anything (which I wasn't so happy about) because things were going too fast for that. I leaned over a counter for a long time with my dad and Scott pushing on my back and hips which were hurting SO bad. I couldn't even move between contractions because I barely got 30 seconds in between each one before the next one hit... sometimes it would be like five contractions in a row with no rest in between. I wanted to change positions but seriously couldn't without having to walk during a contraction. Finally, I was able to get over the bed somehow and labored on my back for awhile. Then the midwife said that Joanna was "sunny side up" so she had me lay on my side and she put a big "peanut" type thing between my legs and pushed on my hips to see if Joanna would turn. Oh my goodness! Laboring on my side was not what I wanted to happen at all! My mom was also keeping me very well supplied with cold washcloths the entire time as I was very hot... my family is amazing! I labored on my side for awhile and then on my back some and FINALLY after checking several times my midwife said I could push which was the best news I had heard for hours!  I don't even know how long I pushed but it didn't seem that long... Maybe around 10 to 15 minutes? It was my first real experience with pushing considering with Daniel I had had an epidural during that stage and with Lydia she came out in the tub with just 2 pushes, so this was a crazy pushing experience! I tried doing everything the midwife said to do but I just remember just wanting a break SO badly. But finally I heard them say that she was coming out and then I remember Jen, the midwife, telling me to open my eyes but I could barely open them because I was completely exhausted! I felt them lay her on my chest and heard her cry and opened my eyes and there was our beautiful Joanna Beth! :) I had done it with the amazing help of my parents and Scott! Wow! Leading up to my labor I was sure that I would cry and cry once she finally arrived but I couldn't even cry because I was so happy and so tired... And I couldn't believe it was only 6:52 p.m. when she arrived! It seemed so much later than that. I was able to hold her for awhile and then my mom held her while the midwife and other nurses figured out what to do for me as I was bleeding a lot... They were extra concerned since I had bled so much after having Daniel so I ended up having to take various pain medications, pitocin, and some type of shot in my leg to help slow down the bleeding... It was crazy! We were laughing with my nurse later saying that it was funny how I was able to labor with no medication but then once Joanna arrived I was all over the pain meds! ;) Lol. By that point I just didn't care too much of staying away from it all... I was just very tired of all the pain and wanted to enjoy my new bundle of joy.

It was sad not being able to have all the family there to come see her right away like at Daniel and Lydia's births, but I'm so glad that my dad, mom, and Scott were all there! :) It was so nice holding her and we took lots of pictures. The nurse came in around an hour after she was born and weighed her in at 9 lbs. 1 oz. and she was 20 inches long with a 14 in. head. One of the first things I noticed was that she had SO much dark hair! Both our other kiddos had blond hair when they were born, so seeing this almost black hair was surprising. She also had her share of some very grumpy faces! Lol. She was cracking us up with all her expressions! I was able to nurse her which she did awesome with and we definitely had a bond from the very beginning. :) I'm thinking she'll be a mommy's little girl for sure!

I think it was around 8:30 or 9 when I thought again about how hungry I was again. I asked the nurse if I could now eat and she said I could but they had just closed down the kitchen area to order food from so my nurse brought me a boxed lunch which was beyond amazing! I think it was because I was so hungry. ;) It had a sandwich wrap, potato chips, an apple, a cheese stick, and a brownie! Delicious Easter meal.

Joanna got all cleaned up and we were able to move up to our recovery/patient room around 10 p.m. Slept awesome that night with us waking her up every 3 to 4 hours to feed. We were into the newborn swing of things once again and I loved it! So excited to welcome Joanna into our family and it's been a wonderful month now of getting to know her more and more! But I'll share more of this past month in her 1-month letter tomorrow (or whenever I get the chance to write that...). :) This whole having 3 kids and moving into a new home (which we did when she was 2 weeks old) has been crazy but I'm LOVING it!

Thank you for reading this LONG birth story. :) Even though I feel like I have no extra time these days, I really do want to keep up with writing blog posts about Joanna and the other kids. The days just pass too fast and with this mommy brain I'm afraid I'm not going to remember things as well as I used to! 

I'll also try to write soon to talk about our new house and post some pictures! Til later then and here are some pictures of the kids meeting her... I'll share more about how they are loving her in the 1-month letter. :) 

Just waiting on a baby... :)

Dear Joanna,

Hi sweet baby! So Mommy is just a few days from being 38 weeks along with you and I'm SO ready to meet you! A week and a half ago your daddy and I spent the day in the midwife office and hospital because we thought you might be coming to see us... but you decided against it. Since then you just keep acting like maybe... just maybe... you want to come out sooner than later but not so far! It is quite the difficult thing going day by day telling myself that it's best if you wait two more weeks, but then I just really want to see you and hold you so I'd be happy if you can earlier, also.

We finally have almost everything ready for you! Your bassinet is ready and waiting for you to sleep in it. Your car-seat is loaded up with your diaper bag full of a cute blanket, an adorable outfit and jacket, socks, and other random things. Your clothes are all up in Lydia's and your closet and all your burp cloths, blankets, etc. are folded and waiting for you. :) So that means you can come whenever you want... just saying. :)

When we were in the midwife office that day they said you were "around" 7 lbs. 8 oz. on the ultrasound... I'm not counting on that at all considering most later ultrasounds like this makes it very hard to find the weight... but I'm already very excited to see how much you are going to weigh! :) AND, on the ultrasound they actually printed off a picture of your hair!! It's crazy long! Like I wouldn't have even thought it was actually your hair because I had no clue what it was! It was quite the crazy hair, too. :) I think you wanted to have lots like your brother and sister did when they were born... At least it makes my heartburn more worth it because I LOVE lots of hair on little babies! :)

Your brother and sister are also SO excited to meet you and hold you. Know that you are ridiculously loved by so many! Daniel talks about you all the time and wants to share some of his birthday gifts with you if you are born close to the 22nd. Lydia just wants to hold and rock you! :) I think it might end up being her favorite thing to do! Your Pappy and Maw-maw are hoping to make it out here when you decide to come to be able to be some of the first ones to say hi and hold you! And, your Aunt Lelia also really wants to be here to see you enter the world. :) Grandpa and Grandma and Uncle Wayne will be able to see you in a few weeks if you are here by then because they'll be coming over to celebrate Daniel's 4th birthday! And all the other family want to meet you soon, too. See... you are going to have quite the exciting world to enter into when you get here! :) Doesn't that make you want to come sooner than later?!

Mommy and Daddy love you so much, little girl! We are excited to meet you and see your sweet face and your tiny fingers and toes and begin this new season with three little kiddos! :) Love you and hope to see you really soon!!!

Love,
Mommy

Getting ready for baby Joanna!

Today is the first day of April and I'm sitting down waiting for Scott to get back from AMP - the weekly meeting on campus... So many things have been going on around here that again, I'm not sure how to catch up but I'll try! 

First of all, I'm officially 36 weeks and 1 day along in this pregnancy which is super exciting!!! It's so crazy to think that there is a big chance that Joanna will be here this month sometime!  The past month or so has definitely been a lot harder with the pregnancy due to frequent and painful Braxton Hicks contractions, "lovely" hormonal emotions, and just getting into the uncomfortable last few weeks... But through it all Joanna is doing awesome which is SO great and she is still a BIG mover! I seriously can't get over how much this girl moves, especially now that she is head down and low. The other day Scott was dying laughing at how funny my belly looked as Joanna was rolling and kicking and doing I don't know what else! It was so weird to watch for me - lol - and Scott wanted to video it! ;) Lol. We did not! I'm still so interested in seeing what she will look like and what kind of personality she'll have! She loves (or hates) music because she goes crazy "dancing" up a storm anytime there is loud music and so far there aren't too many people who touch my belly and end up quieting her down... most of the time she just starts kicking whenever anything with pressure touches my belly! I know in my last post I said that I was measuring one to two weeks ahead, but I think that might have been a misunderstanding from the midwife because since then I've only been half a week ahead with measurement, so that sounds good to me! I still really have NO clue how big she'll be so it'll be a great surprise! :) I'm definitely looking big and ready to have her, but since I'm not measuring that much bigger and since she seems to have a LOT of space to move around still, I wonder if she will end up on the smaller side like Lydia... I guess we'll see soon enough!

This past week was Spring Break so we were able to get all Joanna's stuff put onto shelves in Lydia's closet and a lot of her new clothes washed and hung up! That was super exciting although I still feel very disorganized and it might be interesting trying to find things for awhile after she gets here... I could put more into Lydia's dresser, but right now it's completely filled up with all of Lydia's clothes, so I think I might wait until we move to tackle that! 

MOVING!!! Yes, we are hopefully going to be moving into a new home three weeks after Joanna arrives! We put a contract on a home about 7 minutes northeast of here in Arvada (still about 20 minutes from campus). So far everything has been going well and the inspection went well. The appraisal will be this week so as long as that goes well, then hopefully we will be closing on April 30th! I'm getting SOOOO excited about this move because we really hope we'll be here in this home at least 4 or 5 years before possibly moving again with ministry. That just sounds amazing to me considering this will be the fifth place Scott and I have lived in almost 5 years of marriage! AND, it's a wonderful home - spacious, big, a great backyard, a room for homeschooling, two living spaces, on a cul-de-sac, a block from a park, and in a great area! Awwww, so exciting! :) I'm not sure right now how moving will look with a three week old, but at least it's just in town so while my mom is here Scott can start moving over things we don't necessarily need every day so that when we officially move it won't be as crazy. Then I'm really hoping I'll feel up to unpacking and settling in quickly so we can enjoy our new home for the first part of summer before we head to Durango for almost a month of ministry stuff! 

Daniel and Lydia are both really excited right now about Joanna and the house! Daniel, especially, asks about the house all the time since they were able to be there with us when we first saw it. He loved it and is excited for so many things about it! He's also crazy excited about Joanna coming, especially because he knows she is supposed to be here right around his birthday! :) We are actually planning to have his birthday party with friends and some family only two days before my due date, so maybe we'll have Joanna already and bring her along which he'll LOVE! He is SO excited to be four - seriously sees that as such a grown-up number! :) Lol. He has already been acting so much older in so many ways with how he listens and obeys us, how he cleans up stuff, how he acts with Lydia, and how he talks about Joanna. It's so cute watching him grow up! :) Plus he is SO tall! I don't know how he can grow so fast! He is super excited to take swim lessons this June at our rec center! It'll be interesting in the next few years to see what sport(s) he is most interested in considering all he's done so far is gymnastics and soon swimming. He has loved having more warm days outside riding his strider bike and has gotten SO much better on it! Definitely not as fearful of it as he used to be!

Lydia is quite the big sister already! She tells Joanna that she loves her many times a day and loves giving my belly big hugs and "shows" Joanna many of her new clothes and toys by laying them on my belly. Lol. Today she helped me wash all the rest of the clothes I was going through to put away for Joanna's first few months and Lydia was LOVING being able to help load the washing machine and organize stuff! Her face just lit up when she asked if these were Joanna's clothes! She is beyond excited to have a sister and will often come up to me and put her arms on either side of my belly and then pretend to take Joanna out and "rock" her! ;) She will rock and rock her and it is the cutest thing ever! She's also been very cute with her teddy and dolls lately - taking care of them, pushing them in the stroller, wrapping them in blankets and laying them down for naps... So, so cute! Oh my goodness! I'm beyond excited to see her and Daniel meet their baby sister! It'll be amazing to watch I just know! :) 

There are like SO many things I could say about the kids... I wish I had more time. But I am so tired and ready to get ready for bed. At this rate I might write again before Joanna gets here but there's a good chance the next time I post will be after she's here! How crazy is that?!?! :) Thanks for your prayers for baby's health and just continue praying that everything will go smoothly and amazingly well during the labor and delivery with my emotions and that I'll have  midwife I like (since I don't know which one of the six I'll actually end up having and I haven't even met them all yet!). Thank you! :)

Life in Denver!

I don't even know where to begin when I haven't written anything on here for almost six months now! I've wanted to sit down and write something on here for forever and every kind of excuse - mostly forgetfulness - kept getting in the way... Goodness! I know there aren't tons of people who read my blogs, but I really did have good intentions to write more once we moved over here to Denver and began this new stage of life... Yeah. That didn't happen at all! :( I just read my last blog post and all of that seems like SO long ago! We are still sad and still talk about baby Kalen up in heaven especially with Daniel who will bring "him" up to us... We are still so excited to see baby one day! Since losing our sweet little one, though, we have also lost another nephew, Kamani Kai, the son of my sister and brother-in-law, Lelia and Wayne. He was born and passed away on Oct. 25th over here in Denver after a long last few weeks of the pregnancy. So much to say but I'll just say that we miss him, too, and we are so looking forward to our reunion in heaven one day with all these little babies! Then, on January 11th Scott's oldest brother, Geoffrey, went to heaven after just under a month of the leukemia returning to his body. Yeah, things have been crazy and sad and so full of hard times but through it all God has brought such joy to our family and our life. It's so great seeing His love and comfort with every step we take and we are learning more and more that we can never go through life alone without Him! 

The top highlight of the past six months is that right around the time I wrote last we found out that I was pregnant again! Everything has been going great and I am now seven months (30 weeks) along with our active, sweet little girl growing inside me! My due date is April 28th (just a week after Daniel's 4th birthday!) and as the date gets closer I'm getting more and more excited to meet baby Joanna Beth, but more and more nervous for the labor and delivery... I think it's a good nervousness in some ways because I feel like I need to prepare more for it, but it's also been so hard with all the little babies going up to heaven in the past few years between my sister, us, and so many friends that I think I'm still worried in some ways that something might go wrong. :( This little girl has been covered with prayer since we found out about her, though, so that has been so encouraging to us! So far everything looks like it's going great. Other than having to take the "lovely" glucose test twice (the 1 hour one I didn't pass so I took the 3 hour one, also - but then I passed that with total normal results!), I haven't had other big issues come up. She's measuring 1 to 2 weeks bigger than "average", but that makes sense with our bigger babies! I'm still hoping she ends up being closer to her sister, Lydia's, birth weight of 8 lbs. 5 oz. than to her brother's 9 lbs. 9 oz. but I guess we'll see in a few months! :) We are hoping to have a birthday center hospital tour soon so we can check out the hospital, but I've heard many great things about the Lutheran Hospital near us so I think it'll work out great! And, my mom is planning to be here for the delivery if at all possible and for a few weeks afterwards to help out with stuff, so that is SO nice and such a blessing! I can't believe we'll have three little kiddos in our house! CRAZY and SO amazing! :)

College ministry with Master Plan Ministries has been going awesome! Our first semester was so great but also very full learning everything about being staff with college ministry and getting used to the schedule of everything. This semester has been going great, though, and I am loving every bit of it! Our schedule is very much the same, but Scott and I are meeting with other guys and girls now for one-on-one discipleship and we have been able to help with other staff team stuff as we learn more about doing various things. Austin and Laura just switched over officially to their new positions with MPM (helping our President do much of his work in all the inner details of the ministry) and Jesse and Rhonda are officially our new directors which has been exciting! We have an amazing servant team of student leaders and our spring retreat is coming up this weekend! Be praying because we have around 30 students coming right now with more possibly signing up tomorrow! I'm so excited to get to know all the students better and to see God work in awesome ways through the talks and discussions this weekend. 

We still really enjoy the location of where we are living even though our house is getting a bit small for our growing family. I'm sure that has to do with the amount of stuff we seem to accumulate, but right now we are trying to make it work! We are so thankful for the sun room because that has allowed me to set up a school room area for the kids to do preschool in! It's so much fun having posters hung up and calendars, clocks, etc all on the wall. Both Daniel and Lydia LOVE preschool time! We have been doing Beyond Five in a Row all year which has been so great, easy, and fun and I love all the new books we have been able to read and do activities for! Lydia wasn't that interested in a lot of it this past fall but since Christmas she loves preschool just as much as Daniel! It is seriously one of the biggest highlights of their week and it has been for me, also! We try to do the reading and activities in somewhat of a structured time-frame (because that works SO well with all of us) on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings and I'm so amazed by how quickly they are both learning new things! In the past month we also decided on our plan of action for homeschool for at least the next year and hopefully their entire school years! We are going to sign up Daniel into a group called Classical Conversations which is a Christian classical program for homeschoolers that has a lot of support through a co-op community which meets for a day each week... We tried out one of the communities near us last week and loved it and them and Daniel loved having the structure of being in a classroom doing activities with other kids while also having me there helping with whatever I could. I think it'll be a perfect balance between the social life and having a tutor to help with ideas and teaching and homeschooling which I'm really excited about, too! Plus I LOVE what and how they teach the classical education! 

There are so many other things I could talk about, but I guess that means that I really should try to write on here more often so each of my blog posts are not novels about our life. :) Thank you for reading this if you made it through! Next time I write I really want to have an update about Daniel and Lydia and how they are doing! :) I love those kiddos and every day I'm amazed more and more by how much they have blessed our lives in so many ways! But for now I've got to go! Night!

Valleys and Mountains of Life

Hi everyone!

Isn't life crazy?! Crazy busy, crazy amazing, crazy ups and downs... so much craziness! It has been beyond crazy for us these past few months, especially since I last wrote on here! I don't hardly know where to begin with this update, but I do know I probably should have started at not quite so late an hour... This might have to be something I work on for a few days, but we will see!

I think I wrote my last blog post at the very beginning of June. Since then we have definitely gone through both valleys and mountains in our life. I guess I'll share somewhat in order of how everything went...

On June 16th, we spend Father's Day with my family in Delta (playing croquet in my parents' front yard and then driving to Montrose for a family Frisbee golf game and picnic). On the way home we drove by Walgreens in Fruita to pick up a pregnancy test! Before heading over to Scott's parents' for dinner, I took the test and found out that we were pregnant with Baby #3! It was so awesome to get on the phone and call my parents and to tell the kids and see that even though they didn't fully understand how that could happen so suddenly (lol), they were still full of excitement and Daniel started talking about his new baby "brother" right away! We celebrated more that evening with Scott's family and overall it was an amazing Father's Day! :)

That next week I got sick with something and had some of the worst days of sickness I had ever had... :( I remember we had a few of our really good friends come into town that week and I could barely make it over to see them because of being so weak and just plain exhausted! I didn't think that anything was really wrong with the pregnancy because along with being sick I was having some pregnancy type symptoms, so I just figured this pregnancy might be a little tougher than the previous two... On Sunday, June 23rd, a week after we took the positive pregnancy test, I began feeling SO much better and had the energy to go to church and hang out with friends that evening. Then, at the end of a wonderful evening with some friends, I noticed that I was bleeding and instantly began crying. I don't even know why I went straight to assuming a miscarriage in that minute, but I was so scared... Everyone was amazing and began praying for me and the little baby inside of me and I was actually able to sleep well overall throughout the night. The next morning I got ahold of my midwife after the bleeding was progressively getting worse and not better. She had me go in for a hormone test. I took that which came back lower than they wanted it to be, and after hearing those results and researching as much as I possibly could online, I was losing most of my hope that everything would be okay.

Gosh it was hard to make it through those days up until Wednesday morning when I could head back over to take the second round of hormone tests. The whole time I was thinking of my sister, Lelia, and others I know who had gone through miscarriages and the loss of babies and I was realizing that as much as I had wanted to be there for them before, there was no way I knew what they had and were still going through... I seriously had never pictured myself in that position of going through a miscarriage of my own, but it totally changed my view of babies and pregnancies forever. First of all, as I got the call Wednesday afternoon from my midwife who said that my numbers had dropped and that I was for sure going through a miscarriage, I remember just crying and crying and then opening up my journal and writing. It's so amazing to me how much love a mom can have for her baby even when that little one was only around for a few short weeks inside her! I'm so thankful that God allows us to have that much love for our little ones, though... They are such a miracle even from the very beginning of conception and I am beyond thankful that I KNOW that one day I'll be able to meet our sweet baby up in heaven!

One of the most difficult times after the miscarriage was having to tell Daniel and Lydia what happened. I mean, they are only 3 and 1 and so at first I didn't think they'd really understand, but Daniel understood so much more than I thought he would! He was the first one I actually told because he climbed up on my bed right after I talked to my midwife... He asked me what was the matter as I was crying and crying. I told him that our sweet little baby had gone up to heaven to be with Jesus. He asked why and I didn't really know what to say... I just said that Jesus must have really wanted baby up there. Then Daniel started coloring next to me while I was journaling and I thought that was the end of that and then like 10 minutes later he started bursting into tears! I've never seen him so sad! :( He cried and cried leaning against me and kept asking why God took the baby away and he kept saying that he thought he was supposed to be 4 when the baby came... It was so sad! :( He has gotten much better with it all since then, but he still talks about his baby "brother" (he's convinced it was a brother) and talks about how God can't have anymore of our babies because he has cousin Makaio and cousin Kanoa (my sister's two babies - a still-born and a miscarriage) and our little one... It's hard knowing what to tell him about it all, so we just make sure we listen and try to answer whatever questions he has.

In the few weeks after losing our little one, Scott and I took time to read through baby names trying to find a name for it. The hardest part of losing a baby so young to me is not knowing if it was a boy or a girl! :( Although we end up calling the baby "him" most of the time (probably because of Daniel being so certain :), we still ended up going through gender neutral names and ended up choosing the name Kalen which means pure. It was so nice finally having a name and we love it! It's so nice knowing our little Kalen is up in heaven and one day we can finally hold him! :)

So, going on to the next part of our busy past few months... As we were still grieving over our sweet baby's loss, we also began trying to make decisions on what to do about our house which was STILL on the market and which had STILL not had a single offer in the almost year we had had it on the market! We were getting ready to go to Lake City, CO for 4th of July weekend so finally decided to go ahead and put the house up for rent after we got back if we didn't get an offer beforehand. Then... on the 4th of July as we were driving down to Delta to meet up with my parents as they were going camping with us, we got our very first offer and our house was under contract in a few hours! It was amazing seeing God's timing through it all! Our house closed on July 31st, and we ended up moving out the weekend before to head down to Durango for our staff conference with Master Plan.

The other exciting news at this point was that as we headed down to the staff conference we were right around 73% received and like 91% committed support which was awesome! We had a wonderful time down in Durango with everyone. I just LOVE all the staff we work with and it was such a great time to rest, focus, and hear the vision for where we are praying MPM is heading towards!

We left Durango and went to stay with my parents for a week which was fun. We celebrated Scott's birthday with family on the 5th and then came back up to GJ the next night for a wonderful going away party with many of our amazing friends and family! Gosh we have such great friends over there! I miss them all so much, but I'm really praying that many of the friendships stay strong even over the coming years!

I helped Scott and some of our friends load the moving truck on the 9th and then we all left early Saturday morning, August 10th, to drive over to Denver. Scott's brothers and sister-in-law and mom came and then my parents came over so it was awesome having all their help unloading the moving truck! My parents stayed until the next afternoon which was amazing help to somewhat rearrange furniture, unpack the kitchen and bathroom, and get some of the other stuff unpacked. It was sad seeing them leave with Lydia crying and crying because she wanted to go with them :( but it was nice knowing we'd see them in just three weeks and that we'd be talking to them a lot!

By that point we were right around 98% committed in support and I think around 90% received so after much discussion with our campus director over here he decided that we could go ahead and step on campus doing most everything except for leading a Bible Study or starting any discipleship (any longer term things) and then we will re-evaluate the beginning of Sept to see if we were almost at 100%. It was SO nice knowing we could go onto campus and very encouraging as we were able to get ahold of many of those who had made commitments to see when they were sending in their first gifts!

SOOOO, we started our first week of Master Plan Ministry campus work on Tuesday, August 12th, with a great staff planning day getting ready for the upcoming semester. It was great getting together with the Denisons (Jesse and Rhonda) and Austin and Laura to plan, pray, and eat together. :) Then, on Friday that week we went back over to Austin and Laura's house for the Servant Team planning day which was also great! It was so nice meeting and getting to know everyone on the servant team. I'm so excited to see this team reach out to the new students on campus and see them grow in their walks with God!

August 19th was the first day of the school year here at the Auraria Campus. Mondays are our very busy day because we have staff meetings in the morning and then Servant Team dinner and meetings that evening and then we have a student Bible study at 7 p.m. It's so much fun, though, because I love being around the students and hearing how they are doing! Tuesdays at least for now will be my campus day, so I've been going onto campus with Laura doing information tables and surveys the past two weeks. It's been a great time meeting students, inviting them to our events, doing the Soularium surveys with them (an awesome picture survey that they choose a picture to answer each question), and getting into some great conversations about God and the gospel with them! Starting next week I will be meeting girls for coffee during the day and then I'm hoping to start up a Bible study over the lunch hour if I find much interest from girls! As soon as I get home on Tuesdays Scott is off to campus to go to the weekly AMP meeting which he has really enjoyed. As much as I'd love to be there with the students, I also enjoy having an evening off with just the kiddos and then by myself once they are in bed. :) Wednesdays and Thursdays are Scott's days on campus so he is usually gone from 8:30 to 5, and then Fridays are our ADMIN day to get stuff done! I'm excited for Dinner and Discussion evenings with the students to start up on Friday evenings soon! There is a possibility we might do those here or we might wait until next semester for that... we'll know soon. :)

Well, that's a very short outline of what our weeks have been like on campus these past two weeks. I have been loving it! Trying to get a bit better at balancing stuff, but overall it's been awesome and Scott LOVES it! :) He has gotten to know some great guys and is already excited to start meeting guys for coffee this next week.

I just got our sun room mostly unpacked yesterday which was our biggest amount of work still to be done. We now just have about a day's worth of rearranging and unpacking boxes of stuff we need to find a place for and then we should be DONE! :) I love our home and I'm so excited to get these last boxes unpacked so I can take pics and let you all see what it looks like! I love the neighborhood too and all the great shopping areas although I haven't seen everything yet! All the nice parts of being in a big city! :)

Well there is so much more I could say but I think I'll go ahead and post this considering it took me a week to write it. Hopefully I can write on here more frequently!