Angel Babies

At the beginning of the year Brad and I started feeling strongly that we should meet with our IVF doctor, Dr Foulk.  His office is now in Pleasant Grove instead of Reno which is nice for us!  We meet with him toward the end of February.  He advised us to do some testing to see how my reproductive system was doing.  After the testing one thing lead to another and we were scheduled to do another round of IVF.  We have written about this experience in our personal journal.  I just want to mention it here since it was something that our whole family went through.  

This process took up pretty much our entire year.  We prepared for our IVF cycle, and began it with complete faith. We did one cycle in May which gave us our sweet baby girl, Lottie.  She was not with us very long.  She didn't make it to the transfer date.  I was blessed to see her face in my mind.  I knew her, I felt her spirit and felt like her name should be Lottie after my Grandma Bushman's Grandma Charlotte (who everyone called Lottie).

After loosing her we took a few months off and then felt like it was right to try one more time.  We did our last IVF cycle in November.  On November 16th our twins were transferred to my uterus.  They were healthy healthy embryos.  We were so excited to have them join our family.  We all felt like they were a boy and a girl.  Aleah and Cade talked about them all the time.

We found out that I was pregnant and shared the news with our close friends and family.  It was so much fun!

About a week later I ended up having a miscarriage.  It was hard on all of us!  We miss our babies so much.  We are trying to continue on, knowing that this is how it was meant to be.  We are thankful that we have each other for love and support as we struggle thought this hard time!

Christmas 2015

Right before Christmas break Legacy Elementary always does a Christmas Sing.  The students practice christmas songs and then preform them for all of the parents.  It is so much fun to listen to all of the songs!  This year Cade sang, It Must Be Santa.

Aleah sang, Santa Clause and When Christmas Comes to Town

Once school was out we headed to Brian Head to stay at the cabin with our Godfrey family.  Brad took all the little kids out to the ski slope after it was closed and sent them down on sleds.  They would sled down to the bridge where he would pick them up in the pilot and take them back to the cabin to do it again!  They loved it.

We had an Elf party that was planned by Aunt Dawn.  It was awesome!  We all got elf names, decorated elf cookies, played and elf trivia game, and read passages from the movie, The Elf, with our elf voices that were enhanced with helium!  Aleah and Cade were a little nervous to do the helium, but after laughing as their older cousins did it, they were ready to try.

We has a blast on the tubing hill.  

Grandma Godfrey planned a fun snowman decorating activity.

Aleah and Cade rocked their parts in the nativity on Christmas Eve.  Cade was a wiseman and Aleah was Mary.  We also played the bells and sang.  It was a wonderful evening spent with our family thinking about the blessings that come from the birth of our Savior.

We didn't just get snowed on, we got dumped on.  Brad had to dig out the pilot so that we could go to church!  It was beautiful and crazy.  It just kept snowing and snowing!

After it had snowed all night Brad and I decided to go enjoy the powder on our snowboards.  We were having a great time and decided to go to the other side of the mountain.

It was a great day of snowboarding, until it was time to head back to the cabin!  They didn't groom the run that took us back to the other side of the mountain.  We ended up stuck in snow up to Brad's waist!  We had to hike, plowing our way through the deep deep snow all the way back to the cabin.  It took us over an hour and a half.  Our muscles were so dead!  What an adventure!

Uncle Mark made a fun igloo.

We hit the slopes with Grandma and Grandpa Godfrey.  It snowed on us the entire time!  I love this picture of Grandpa, Cade, and Grandma on the lift!

Soon we were frozen from head to toe.  We all laughed when we noticed that Aleah's hair was totally frozen and covered in snow!

As always, we had such a wonderful time at the cabin for our Christmas break.  We love being together and spending time with our family!

Our birthday girl!

We are so blessed to have Aleah in our family.  She is so happy and caring!  I absolutely love her laugh!  We love everything about her.  She calls herself my "hug-a-bug".  She loves to sit on my lap and hug me.  I love it too!  I will take it for as long as it lasts.  We had such a great time celebrating her.

One of the things that she loves to do is ice skating.  She was so excited to go ice skating for our family date.  I still couldn't exercise at that time, so I got to take pictures.

Aleah had family birthday parties this year.  She had a party with our Godfrey side.

She wanted a Christmas themed party.  She loves that her birthday is right by Christmas!  I'm so thankful that loves it.  So we made some 3D snowflakes and had hot chocolate and sugar cookies.  I made up my own gluten free sugar cookie recipe.  I was so proud of myself because my cookies were so yummy!  I made regular sugar cookies for everyone else.  Everyone said that they were good too.

She is so cute.  She wanted dangly earrings and high heal church shoes.  It is so much fun to buy girly things for her.  But, I still wish that she would stop growing up so fast!

She also had a party with our Stone side.

Legos are still a hit at our house!

I love that my grandmas could come to the party.  We love them so much!

Happy birthday to our 7 year old!

December is here!

How much can we fit in during the month of December?  Sometimes I feel like December is like the game Tetris!  Thankful, I love that game and I love all the fun things we were able to do!  I will have to do a few posts about our December.

To start off our month Cade got to compete in his first gymnastics meet.  He competed level 4.  He was too young to compete most of the season.  The age requirement for level 4 is 6 and he was 5 until his birthday in February.  He got to compete in this meet since it was a practice meet for the judges. He was so excited!  He is so strong and really amazing.  He is a lot of fun to watch!

He did really well and loved every minute of it!

We got to see Santa at Grandma Great's house.  Aleah and Cade had a good visit with him.  Cade was excited to tell Santa our secret, that I was pregnant.  It was one of the cutest moments!  I didn't know that it was going to happen and I wish that I would have caught it on video!

 All the silly great grand kids with Santa and Mrs. Clause.

One Saturday morning after learning that my nephew, who is 5 weeks younger than Cade, lost two teeth and that his molars were growing in, I decided to see if Cade's molars were growing in.  I had been asking him if he had any loose teeth and his answer was always no.  I looked in his mouth and sure enough his molars were growing in.  Then to my complete surprise I saw two other little white things on the bottom behind his two front teeth!  

I was so shocked that I said, "Ahhh! Your teeth are growing in!"  To which Cade responded with, "Oh! That's what that is.  I was trying to figure out what it was that I could feel with my tongue!"  After a call to our dentist, I began wiggling them and wiggling them.  A week or so went by and they were still not budging!  So in to the dentist we went to have them pulled.  

I talked to Cade and tried to explain to him what was going to happen.  He was so brave!  He said that it didn't even hurt.  He thought that it was really strange when his lip started going numb.

It was so crazy to watch our dentist pull out two super long teeth!  Those roots were not going anywhere!

Thankfully, his permanent teeth have moved into place!  Now I'm hoping that this doesn't happen with all of his teeth.

Every year at gymnastics the gym does pictures.  Last year I didn't order any because I thought that it was just another thing that they wanted us to spend money on!  Brad has fond memories of his pictures from when his was in sports when he was little.  He really wanted to do the pictures.  I gave in and I'm so glad that I did!  Of course, they were all super cute!  I picked four pictures and I have them hanging on our family room wall.  I love it!

This is Cade's Level 4 team.  They are such great boys and all good friends.  Cade calls them his boys.  I think that it is so cute.  He will say something like, "I can't wait to show this to my boys!"

This is Aleah's level 3 team.  They are such cute girls.  I love that she has so many good friends.  It is fun to watch them work hard together and laugh hard together!