End of Summer

September, September. Where did the summer go? August was absolutely nuts. We spent the first two weeks in insane packing mode and I never want to do that again...although I'm sure we will. I get a pit in my stomach just thinking about it but luckily it feels like it was just a bad dream now. We had a ton of help from fabulous friends who watched the girls for me and amazing family who came up to help clean and load. Becca and Daniel drove up for a few days from Salt Lake and were unbelievable. They washed windows, packed boxes, disassembled furniture and worked so tirelessly and cheerfully. I don't know how we would have gotten it all done without them.

In the very little extra time that we had, we tried to do some fun things with the girls and visit places we would miss. We went to the fair, swimming at the rec center, the children's museum, into Boulder, and hugged all our friends goodbye again and again.

On the 19th, we set out for Utah and have been living in my parents basement for the last two weeks. We are so lucky to have family to put up with us while we house hunt and try to figure out where to get settled. The girls love living with their grandpa and grandma and even though we are super messy and noisy and destructive and have completely taken over the garage, the basement and pretty much the whole house we feel very welcome which sure is nice. I have never blogged from Salt Lake before because I always just waited till I got home to Colorado but I figure I better get into a new groove.  I'm not sure if it has actually set in that we live here now and that we aren't going back but I know it feels right. I'm really happy to be here. We loved Colorado but I'm a Utah girl through and through.

We were very lucky to have our house go on the market on August 24th and go under contract the 26th. Hopefully the sale goes through smoothly from here on out but it was a big relief to have it sell so quickly and so well.

So far, Ben seems really happy at his new job. The commute hasn't been too bad and he seems to really enjoy his new work environment, his coworkers, and the new projects they are working on.

My tiny Rosie and Evie started preschool today. I welled up with tears at the door but they didn't look back even once. They have struggled a little with all the transitions and craziness of the last several weeks (Evie especially), and I'm excited to have them getting into a routine and schedule here. I came back to my moms feeling a little sad and weird not knowing what to do with myself. As much as I want the break, I keep thinking about how I want to be there watching them play and do their art projects and stand up in front of the class for show-and-tell. But then I immediately passed out on the couch and woke up completely sold on the idea of having them gone a few hours a week. It'll be good for all of us.

 

 

New Bathroom

The bathroom is finally finished and it is gorgeous. I must admit I was not overly supportive of the project from the get-go and was not thrilled with all the time it was taking. There is just SOOOOO much to get done around here. But, in the end, I think it was worth it. I took a long hot bath last night and then moved to the shower and I seriously felt like I was at a spa. What a bummer to be packing up and leaving it all behind.

Ben worked on it every weekend and evening for about a month and it was an insane amount of work. I spent all of 3 hours being Ben's water girl and sponging the walls as Ben moved along grouting. That alone convinced me of what tiring, back breaking, knee crunching, up and down labor it was throughout the whole process. Ooooof.

Before

Gutted

Framing

Dry wall

Here's to you Ben. You are so very talented and hard working and I love being married to such a handy man.

Moving

How quickly things change. I came into this summer without a thought in my head about leaving Colorado and now we are heading back to Utah in about two weeks! I can hardly believe it. It's all happened very fast and out of the blue. Ben is kind of a nut and has been talking about maybe moving since January but I never took him seriously. He was talking about Seattle and then San Diego because his current company has offices there. I thought he was mostly just bored at work and likes looking at real estate in different places. Then at the beginning of June he applied for a couple of jobs in UT. I have always told Ben that eventually I wanted to end up back there to be close to family but we always said the earliest that would happen would be after being in CO for 5 years.

In order to get a job at one of the very few companies that do wireless software in UT, Ben would need at least that much experience. Plus I always had Ben reminding me we would most likely never move back because jobs are scarce, the money would stink, and he wasn't that interested in living there or working for any of the companies in the area. Which was a hard thing for me to accept but had gotten much easier.  I always had a tough time saying goodbye to my family and the first hour of almost every drive home consisted of a conversation of some day getting back to Utah. But once we were home and back in our routine, we were happy being away.

Ben ended up getting a promotion a couple months ago which barely qualified him for some new UT positions, 2 years earlier then we expected. And when they popped up online he applied for them without saying a word to me about it. Even after several phone and on-sight interviews I still wasn't taking it too seriously because I didn't have very high expectations that it would amount to anything. I kept thinking that if he did get the job, the offer would be so lousy that we wouldn't even consider it because that was the case when he applied for jobs in Utah when he was getting ready to graduate.

So anyways...he finally got an official offer in the middle of July and it was better than we anticipated. This all was going on while I was in Salt Lake visiting family and Ben was at home working. It was very stressful and a much harder decision then I had anticipated. It has really surprised me (and Ben) how hard it has been for me to agree to this move. Debating this has made us realize how much we've come to love Colorado and our wonderful friends. There's a lot of things about this move that worry me and the timing seems less than perfect. Poor Ben had started having terrible attacks in July and went to the emergency room and found out he has gall stones and needed go have his gall bladder removed. AND while I was away in SLC he went ahead and gutted the master bathroom to remodel. So I came home to a husband going into surgery the next morning, the bathroom still far from being finished, and an entire house to pack. I had been feeling really great the last few months of pregnancy and out of nowhere everything changed and I felt really lousy and started having braxton hicks contractions at the drop of a hat. They were really slowing me down and making me nervous because I went into preterm labor with the girls around this same time in my last pregnancy. I was really wondering if this decision was right.

But this past week has brought a lot of comfort. I know Heavenly Father answers our prayers and is so aware of the things we are struggling with. Ben had surgery and spent most of the weekend in bed but has since made a full recovery. He has been slaving away on the bathroom every evening and it is ALMOST finished. The girls have been angels this week and let me make a small dent in packing. I'm feeling much better and I think lots of my contractions and feeling bad was probably just brought on by stress and all the anxiety I was having about making this big decision. Things seem to be falling into place and I have such a wonderful support group of women here who are lining up to help me and watch the girls and make this easier. Not to mention a husband that is seriously an animal when it comes to working hard. I know once this crazy bathroom project is done, the stress I feel over packing is going to be greatly alleviated.

Right now I feel more focused on how sad I will be to say goodbye to Colorado but I know once the move is over and done with, I will be thrilled to be back in Utah. I know it is where I want to be and I'm so grateful that this opportunity came around. Ben is super excited for this job and feels like its a good move for him career wise. Right now he works for a really secure, big company with lots of perks but ends up doing a lot of boring work or having no work at all because they end up canceling so many projects and there's lots of red tape. This new company is only about six years old and he'll be one of only 8 engineers and able to have a much bigger hand in development and hopefully a bigger impact.

Plus Ben is getting a little tired of all the back and forth we do to Utah for this or that. In the just over 3 years we have lived here, I have been been to Salt Lake 16 times to visit. That's about 16,000 miles and 256 hours in the car. Most my friends from Utah out here go back maybe once or twice a year and  find it baffling how much we make the trek. I know there is NO other husband on Earth that would do that to make me happy. So I understand why Ben was getting frustrated with me dragging my feet to make this move. It makes sense for us and I know our lives will be simpler and better for it.

Visiting family has been a huge priority while we were living here but I am so grateful that we spent the time away. We really became our own family in Colorado. Rosemary and Evelyn went from tiny 3 week old newborns to beautiful 3 year old little girls. It has been so good for us and we have been so blessed. We have made wonderful friends and awesome memories. We will miss all the open space and how everything is built on a trail system. We will miss the big sky and the sunny clear days all through the winter. We will miss hanging out in downtown Boulder and Denver.  We will miss our lovely home, our big back yard, and the awesome Rec Center we spend so much time at. We will miss our neighborhood full of such fun families that hang out every Friday night. We will miss our incredible ward that has been the best we have ever been apart of. We'll miss the moms group I spend a lot of time with and living near Chris, Cindy and little miss Sadie. We will miss having so many fun visits from grandparents, aunts, uncles, and dear friends coming to stay. I'll miss having Salt Lake as a getaway and a change of pace;  the excitement of going to visit and the comfort of coming back home. Even though it's crazy, I'll miss the long car rides with my family and the time to think and just sit and talk. There's a lot we will miss but a lot we are looking forward to as well.

We'll miss you Colorado. Thanks for being so good to us and becoming a place that feels like home.

These cute faces from our time in Salt Lake this summer are helping me get through the drudgery of packing and goodbyes. 

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.