New Orleans Trip

For Labor Day we went to go visit my sister, Annaliese, who just had a new baby boy, and see the sites of New Orleans. We got the true New Orleans experience as we arrived in the midst of Tropical rain storm Lee. We ate lots of Cajun food which was Ryan's main goal, got to be there for Carter's baby blessing and played a lot with my niece addie and new nephew Carter. Luckily the weather cleared up the last day before Ryan flew out so that we were able to go on a really fun swamp tour, ate Beignet, (french doughnuts) at the famous Dumond cafe, and walked around the French Quarter. We also went uptown where the universities are and walked around looking at all the houses that were so beautiful with really cool archicecture and my favorite big front porches and huge (I can't remember what kind of trees) lining the streets. I stayed a few extra days after Ryan left and ate Blue Bell ice cream to my heart's content :) and generally hung out, went to a couple of parks, tried to highlight Annaliese's hair-didn't turn out- she had to dye it dark after i left, and went on a tour of one of the old plantation houses.

And now for the pics....

Carter's Blessing Day

On the Swamp tour...

.There were a bunch of houses (I use that term very loosely) on a part of the river that some people actually lived in year round, and can only be gotten to by boat, and some were just fishing getaways. This one never recovered from Katrina

Cafe Dumond

Jackson Square

French Market
French Quarter

Cool house by the university. All the houses were so nice, there was one street that we wanted to walk down but was gated with a guard who said we couldn't get in without invitation.
We didn't take a whole lot of video, but Ryan put this little video together of our trip really quickly, I think its working...

The Happiest Day

To make it official, I AM PREGNANT!!!!! After 4 years, countless dr. appointments, unpleasant testings, many, many blood draws, medications, shots, 4 failed inseminations, 1 surgery, 1 cancelled in-vitro and one successful in-vitro to say that we are excited and happy is an understatement. It actually still feels surreal to even be able to make the announcement. I still feel like an "infertile" masquerading as a pregnant woman.

As scary as it was to finally proceed with in-vitro it felt like this was the next step. The two weeks of medications, shots and daily dr. appointments were nothing compared to what is known in the infertile world as the two week wait. I envisioned both outcomes and prepared myself for what I assumed would be the worst as we had yet in all our years ever seen a positive pregnancy test. The day finally arrived. I couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, and felt as nervous as if I had to give a talk in sacrament meeting that day. We drove to the dr. appointment for yet another blood draw to find out if I was pregnant or not. We drove home almost in silence and literally sat on the couch just waiting for the phone to ring. When the call came the dr said these words, "Well, you're definitly pregnant", All I could say in shock and immediately in tears was " Really?", You're levels look good he said. Ryan literally jumped for joy when he heard my response. The next couple of hours were so amazing that we both feel like it was the happiest we had ever been and that we will never forget.

I am currently 12 weeks pregnant and feel incredibly blessed for this to work and to be able to stay pregnant and that this is due to our family and friends prayers and fasting on our behalf. Thank you everyone so much!!

We have already had several ultra sounds already, we might be a little biased but we feel like our baby is pretty darn cute already:

This was our very first ultra sound at about 6 wks to see if it was twins or not. Its not, which is totally ok with me. The arrow is pointing a little tad pole but can barely be seen.

This was our second ultra sound at about 9 wks. This was the first time we heard the baby's heart beat. The most amazing experience, I finally started to feel like this was really going to happen. We affectionatly nick named the baby "gummy" as it looks like a cute little gummy bear in this pic.

We had a little scare around week 10 when I had a little bit of bleeding, we are definitly overly paranoid and went to the ER. Everything was fine, baby was completely normal and we even saw it move its arm's a little bit.

Finally we had our first dr.'s appointment at my regular ob clinic at 12 weeks. This time we actually saw the baby moving a lot which was so cool.

Catch Up!

So, I feel like for a while now I have been starting every blog with, Wow, it has been a while since I last wrote a post, but it really has been. Maybe now that I am unemployed, I can remedy that, but my last day of work was July 29th, over two weeks ago and I am just now getting around to that. For those who don't know while we were on our vacation I got a text from my boss which said to call him when I got a chance. So, when we got back from the cruise while we were in Florida I called him back expecting some minor work related question to follow but instead was shocked to hear him say that he was sorry to have to tell me this while on vacation but it had been decided to shut our Utah office down. The economy is bad, and the real estate market is really bad, and I know we had lost millions of dollars in loans uncollectable so I knew that it might happen eventually but I thought we had enough loan to work thru to get us thru this year. I was wrong. In all honesty I hadn't been that happy there for the past couple of years, it was slow, very slow, My boss that had hired me that I had worked with for 5 years had been let go (because they were not going to be doing any new loans for a while- that should have been a red flag for me) and it just wasn't fun anymore. But it is hard to let go of that security blanket, good money, insurance, 401K all gone. For 7 years time, I got 7 weeks of severance pay and a bonus, so the loss of income hasn't really hit me yet but I am sure reality will hit soon. Anyways a quick update on our activities this summer since then:

Ryan ran a triathalonn in ST. George with a bunch of friends. Unfortuatley we had just gotten home from a two week vacation consisting of unlimited food and not a lot of exercise time and the bike that he borrowed was a mountain bike (everyone else had city bikes which are way, way faster) and to top it all of his bike kept getting flat tires and since he had a mountain bike it took about 30 min to find someone with the right air pump. So, it turned out not to be the greatest of experiences but he wants to do another one for a better experience. Other than that we had a super fun trip with good friends and great weather.

We went and saw the musical Les Miserables. We both had read the book (yes, the big fat one with like 1500 pages) and loved the story. The musical was awesome! I highly recommend it to everyone.

We went to (one of) our fertility clinic's patient party which was at Heritage Park up in Salt Lake by the zoo. It was actually a pretty cool park, its kind of a re-creation of a pioneer town and the employees- I mean pioneers- actually take their roles very seriously. My in-laws decided to have their family reunion there after all we told them about it. We almost won the grand prize ($5000 off an in-vitro cycle) I say almost because when they called out the names they said Diane and Ryan long pause and some one else' s last name. So close... Really how could there be any other Diane and Ryan couples out there, none as cool as us I'm sure:)

Went on a couple of hikes with friends.

My cousin Arielle came and visited. It was super fun catching up! Oh yea, and I had a birthday. Ryan made me a yummy breakfast in bed and then took me shopping and to dinner. Then tried to surprise me with a surprise party at our neighbor's house but needs to work a little on his mischevious skills because when I asked him what the plans were for that night he just said our neighbors wanted us to stop by for a minute and that was all he would tell me. But I appreciated the thought:) and for all the friends and family who came!

Home from vacation

Well, it has been a while since my last post we haven't been up to much, just a cruise, a week long stay in Orlando and a Triatholon in St. George two weeks later (more to come on that later). I had been waiting to post on our vacation pics because Ryan is planning to do a cool video of our trip but it hasn't happened yet so I willl give a little preview.

Leaving Ft. Lauderdale on the cruise, the first day.

First Island... Princess Cays- Bahamas- Its the cruise line's private island... we did some snorkeling abd the crusise provided a yummy bbq lunch- Itwas also Ryan's birthday that day.Birthday dinner, the cake was delicious.The second island was St. Martten, which we did a lot of sightseeing on. One side of the island was Dutch and the other was French. This was on the Dutch side.This was an actual french bakery that we chilled at for a little while.

Also on the French side a cool pirate fort we hiked up to.

In St. Thomas we pretty much camped out the whole day at Megan's Bay
This was the last island Grand Turk, It was such a fun day. Its a small island only 7 miles long and a mile or half mile wide can't remember. My pretty gel toes:)

Ryan's sister and brother -in-law came with us we had a lot of fun with them.

Since this was our last island day we hung around till the last moment not wanting to leave our little island paradise. We loved our ship too, it was so nice!

When we got back to Ft. lauderdale we rented a car and met up with the rest of Ryan's family in Orlando. We were kind of pictured out (really this is just a sliver of the pics that Ryan took and we have a ton of video) by that time so we really don't have any of our week in Fl. except for what other people took. We did one day at disney world one day at Universal studios Island of Adventure park which was way fun, the new Harry Potter ride is amazing, and a couple of Florida beaches that couldn't hold a candle to the carribean beaches as you can tell we got a little beach spoiled.

Vacation Booked- YEAAA

So, we've been talking about going on a cruise, since we got married, and we're finally going! We are so excited. It's a 7 day cruise going to ST. Thomas, St. Marten, Turks & Caicos and the Princess Cays at the end of April over Easter and Ryan's birthday. Then when we get back to Ft. Lauderdale we are going to drive up to Orlando and stay a week there with Ryan's family. Two whole weeks! I have never been on a vacation that long. After a crazy busy month with Ryan working crazy over time hours for the past few weeks, like 30 hour shifts, and going down to one car, (Ryan's long term auto repair guy professionaly advised his car's not worth fixing) we decided its the perfect time to take a nice long break . And our ship was also christened by my favorite bacholerette couple Trista & Ryan, stupid I know but it just seems like this should be our cruise ship.

Moving & In-vitro

Yes, both of these things almost happened last month and then neither of them did. Ryan's boss approached him with a potential job offer to go work for Donny Osmond in Vegas for what would be a pretty good raise working part time 36-weeks out of the year. It sounded like a cool opportunity and we were interested. A couple of days later we headed down to Vegas for Ryan to interview with Donny (yes we're on a first name basis now:)) The interview went well. The job was basically to be the backstage director of the show. I'm not very good at explaining all the details about the job but basically Donny told Ryan that he thought even though Ryan didn't have the specific training in that particular job that he could do it and would have 60 days to be trained by the person that was leaving. Donny wanted us to go to to the show that night and then meet with him and Marie afterwards. I wouldn't normallly go to Vegas and think hey, lets go see the Donny & Marie Osmond show, but it was actually a pretty fun show, although it did have its cheesy parts and we were the youngest people there. I kinda thought they might forget about us after the show, but right afterwards his manager came and grabbed us and took us backstage. So, Donny sits us down at a table and Marie comes over and meets us and starts telling me how much i will like living in Vegas and if we are lds and that sort of thing and meanwhile I hear Donny asking Ryan if he wants to take the job and if he can start on Tuesday, as in few days from then. We both gave him a deer in the headlights look and since we didn't really respond he said to let him know first thing in the morning. So, we go back to our hotel room in total shock. Neither of us thought we would have to be making a life changing decision so quickly and to potentially have Ryan move in a few days. We were totally stressed out to say the least. For anyone who knows me, decisions are not my strong suit. I have a hard time deciding what to order at restraunts. As scary and as big of a descision as it was we decided that if the pay was right it would be too good of an opportunity not to take. We left Vegas the next morning thinking this place was going to be our new home. Then the negotioations started, the first amount offered was a lot lower than we had been originally been told so we asked for a lot higher number and then waited and waited to hear back.

Now admist all this going on we had been going thru our fertility issues. I haven't said really anything about on this blog so far, I don't know why, lots of reasons I guess, its so emotional, didn't know what to say, have too much to say, don't know if the blog is the right place to say it, but this this is our life and if you're reading my blog I assume you are interested in my life and this has been a huge part of our lives for the past few years and I think its the hardest thing i've had to deal with in my life. But since this blog is already too long I'm going to try and keep it short. This same week we were in the process of taking a bunch of fertiltiy meds and shots in preparation of doing a souped up version of artificial insemination. We got back from Vegas about 1am in the morning and woke up the next day (Sat) to go to our dr. appt. At the appt we found out that the meds had been working too well, which is good and bad, good because it is good that my body responded well to it and bad b/c they wouldn't do the procedure b/c of too high a risk of multiples, but said we could transfer to doing in-vitro. So, now in the middle of trying too figure out possibly taking a new job and moving we have to decide if we want to pay a lot, lot of money to do in-vitro. Long story short, we decided to do it but it turned that I ovulated that night on my own so when we went to the next appointment they said it wouldn't be worth it to retrieve the few eggs that hadn't ovulated yet and thankfully got a refund of most of our money.

That same day the job offered Ryan pretty close to what we had asked for. So, he took the job. and was off to Vegas the next morning. We had a tearful goodbye (on my part) at the airport as it felt like a good bye to our life as we had known it so far. But, as it turned out the guy that was going to train him was leaving at the end of the week so instead of 2 months it was only going to be 4 days, not nearly enough time for Ryan to be able to take over running of the show. Ryan and the manager mutually decided that it was not going to be enough time for Ryan to be trained for the job. They treated him well, limo ride to the airport, compensation for his time. We are both glad that we at least tried it or else we would have always wondered what if..

So, for a minute we thought we were going to have this crazy cool life changing job and a baby but alas life is just back to normal for us. But I have to say that it was definitly a growing and bonding experience for both of us. I got a glimpse of why people say they are thankful for their trials which I have understood in theory but not in practice before this. I still can't say that I am really thankful for any of the trials i've had but i think this experience although hard and stressful was something that we needed to go through. We also realized how lucky we are to have really great friends and family that we can talk to and who are so supportive and great! So, thanks for all those who were praying for us, we really appreciate it and we still need those prayers!