New York- 11/11/11- 5 Year Anniversary

For our awesome 5 year anniversary date we went to New York. It was fun, but I probably wouldn't advise anyone who was pregnant to go. If i was to do it all over again I probably would have picked a more relaxing vacation to go on, just because of all the walking involved and my body isn't used to walking around with all this extra weight:)

We did all of the touristy things. Went to times square, rockefeller center, metropolitan museum of art, central park, top of the empire state building, statue of liberty, rode the subway and saw a parade and the Wall Street protestetors.

Our hotel.
The morning of our anniversary 11/11/11 we walked outside of our hotel to a full blown New york parade, in honor of our anniversary or Veterans Day, (one or the other)


Met




This bridge at Central Park look familiar? Its in the Cloverfield movie at the very end, probably other movies too.


Who knew there was a freakin castle in Central park, would have loved to explore this if it hadnt been getting dark

random brake dancers in the subway
From the top of the empire state building, it is crazy that you are looking down on all the sky scrapers from this buildilng

Halloween Stuff

October flew by, we had a lot of fun celebrating all things scary...

We went to Cornbellies, a haunted corn maze.

We saw the Odyssey Dance Theatre's Thriller performance. Even if you are not huge into dance it is really a very entertaining show, and the dancing is absolutley amazing.

We carved a pumkin in baby Tristan's honor, whose initials are going to be....

We watched a lot of scary movies.

We went to our neighbor's Halloween Party. ( We are the typical red neck shot gun wedding, I am trying to sell it by rubbing my belly )

A Boy!

While we were going thru the in-vitro process I was at the store or somewhere I can't quite remember but I saw a bottle on it or something that said Tristan on it (which was already the boy name we had picked out) and I kinda felt like it was a sign (in a non-sacreligious sort of way) that helped me think this might work, along with the fact that if this worked the baby due date is 2 days before my dad's birthday. The same weekend we found out we were pregnant we also bought some energy bars that we took hiking with us and my bar's expiration date was two days after my due date. Silly things I know, but as anxiety filled as I was, they kinda helped.

Anyways, I was pretty convinced that we were going to have a boy. But, I had always pictured us with a girl first. Probably because I am the oldest in my family, Ryan's sister is the oldest in her family and his sister and my sister and my brother all had girls first and Ryan was convinced it was going to be a girl. So, I began to think we were having a girl. The day of our ultra sound finally arrived. As the technician measured every body part, baby was uncooperatively crossing his or her legs and was very relaxed not wanting to move. Nearing the end of the appointment I grew dissapointed thinking we might have to wait several more weeks to find out. She had me get up walk around turned me over to one side and then the other and then Ryan said, Ahh, I think that looked like a boy, and sure enough it was. The technician girl said yes I am about 100% positive this baby is a boy! Since we had both names picked out it was so cool to be like ok, now we know its Tristan in there. I admit I felt like I might be a little out of my element with a boy. I am not all that interested in sports and cars and all that "boy" stuff. But I am so excited for him to come so that I can learn!! After the ultra sound appointment I immediatly went to Baby's R Us and bought the cutest newborn onesies for him.

As requested here is a preggie pic of me and my belly.

Also, this morning (Wed, Nov 2nd, I always write my blogs a week before I get around to transferring the pics off the camera) I finally felt little Tristan moving around like crazy, such a cool feeling, Ryan could even feel him move just a little bit once.

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!