Newport!

Oh I love our annual trip to Newport Beach and it just gets better and better every year. Eve and Rose loved being with their cousins in the sand, digging for sand crabs with grandpa, playing in the water with their daddy, and going to get donuts in their pajamas for breakfast. Beach babies through and through.

Ben couldn't stay the whole week and left on Wednesday to get back to work and I hated seeing him go. The plan was to drive home in the minivan with my sisters and all the girlies on Saturday but we didn't make it very far. We hit a tire tread that was in the middle of the road about 45 minutes outside of Baker, CA. It broke something underneath the car and our air conditioning went out. It was 107 degrees outside and that van got HOT, FAST. All the little girls in the back were red cheeked and sweating, rubbing cold baby carrots against their cheeks and by the time to we got to the gas station in Baker we were all about to lose it. Hoping it was just a matter of recharging the A/C, we corralled all the kids at rest stop for over an hour while a mechanic looked at it and gave us terrible news. He couldn't fix it and said that we would have to go on to Vegas, where if we found someone to do it, it would be a 3-4 hour repair. Nightmare.

Then my super hero dad single-handedly unpacked and re-packed all of the luggage from both cars in that insane heat and got all the luggage into the minivan and somehow got all the car seats into the Pilot. My mom, my 2 sisters, me and all four kids drove home comfortably while he toughed it out in the oven car for the the next 10 hours home. Holy cow...I'm so grateful for good men in my life that step up and do unthinkable things to rescue the people they love. Thanks dad. 

IT'S A GIRL!!!!!

We found out this wonderful news about six weeks ago but we were keeping it a secret until we could see some family in person. We also had been debating on waiting to find out the gender altogether (and by we I mean me) but those plans got tossed out the window when we got some worrisome news. Our gender ultrasound was not the special, magical day I had been imagining. Our sweet baby girl had two soft markers for down syndrome and trisomy 18. She has Renal pyelectasis — a condition in which an area of a kidney is enlarged and a Choroid plexus cyst (CPC) on her brain. We had had the ultrasound tech seal up the gender results so we could later debate when to find out and do something special. But when the doctor came in with this news, the gender suddenly didn't seem to matter so much. We luckily got in to see a special the next week and they really helped to alleviate our fears. Both these soft markers are not that big of a deal on their own, but more concerning when seen together. Since then, I have gotten test results back from a new test they can do called  Maternity21 and baby girl appears to be just fine. I won't take the remarkable news of a healthy baby for granted again.

I thought I was going to do something really fun and cute to announce the gender to family but by the time we saw everyone I just wanted to do something easy. We were able to tell Cindy, Chris, Daniel and Becca at a weenie roast in our backyard and then my family on the 4th of July. Rosie and Evie loved passing out the chocolate bars and gobbling them up afterwards. We are very thankful and very excited to have this sweetie pie joining our family.

Rosie and Evie loved the 4th of July and we had a great time celebrating it in SLC before heading to Newport, CA.