Colorado Family Reunion

The week before labor day we were lucky enough to take a trip to Colorado.  And if it wasn't for the miscarriage this trip would have been perfect, because the rest of it really was amazing.  Curse those lovely terrible hospital visits scattered in between all the fun.

Anyways, this was our second trip out to Colorado and every time I go there I want to stay forever.  Really Colorado is gorgeous and has so many fun things to do.  The kids did amazing on both the trip out and on the way back.  I have many fond memories of road tripping it with my family as a kid and this road trip was pretty darn close considering our kids are still young.  They loved going through all of the tunnels in the mountain and playing at a really fun park in Grand Junction and then of course watching movies and singing songs together.  No one even cried until the last 5 minutes of the trip.

Our first stop on our trip was to visit my cousins.  

They moved out to Colorado a few years ago and I am not sure if we had seen them since.  So it was so fun to have them meet Jensen and Declin and for us to see how much they had all grown (their oldest just went to college!  Can't believe it I swear he just turned 12 in my head).  Their youngest, Alex, is about 5 months older then Adalyn so it is more like my kids playing with my cousins.  Emily (their youngest girl) was great and played with Adalyn a lot.   Adalyn was in heaven having another girl to play with.  

McKay LOVED their yard.  Like so much that he almost came home and started looking for a new house for us to move to.  Their yard is surrounded by trees and lots of open space so of course he had to go out and dig a hole and build a fort with the boys.  

Jensen pretty much lived outside while we were there playing with trucks, bikes, and watching their chickens.  Adalyn just followed Emily around wherever she went.  I enjoyed chatting with my Aunt and older cousins and playing Settlers that night after putting the kid to bed.  Thanks Steven and Kristen and family for letting us come see you!      

       

We stayed with Steven and Kristen for one night and then we headed to McKay's sister's, Candace, house.  They live about 35 mins apart so it worked out perfectly.  

Candace recently moved into a new house that Chad (her husband) built.  This is their 4th home that they have built together.  Amazing right?!  Yes it is.  It was perfect for our family reunion and had plenty of space for all of McKay's siblings and their families.  Our first day there we headed to a park close by.  We had a picnic lunch and let the kids play while the adults caught up on each other's lives.  Can I just say that these cousins play SO well together.  Obviously the toddlers have their moments, but overall they are SO great together.  The older kids are great at making up games for them all to play and the younger ones love following along.  All in all there were 13 kids.  Most of them little boys.  :)

  
The next day everyone went for a hike/walk (no pictures from me since McKay and I did not go on the hike) and I heard they got a little lost, but had fun exploring the trail.  That evening all the girls got to head out for a girls night out while the daddies stayed home with the kids.  I think things got a little wild for the daddies, but the mommies sure had the best time eating delicious Italian food and shopping till 11pm (thank you Kohls for staying open late) :)  This is the moment where I regret not getting a picture with all the ladies.  :(  But we had a blast and all of us agree that moms night out was the best night of the whole trip.

Saturday we did some kid fun and went roller skating.  None of our kids have done roller skating before so we were a little nervous on how they would all take it.  But things went fairly smoothly and my kids really enjoyed it.  We drove to the skating rink with a few cousins in the back so we enjoyed taking a peak into our future.  Do kids really have to be in a carseat until they are 8?!  That is a lot of carseats.

   
Being at the skating rink brought back a few memories from my childhood.  Rollerblading was the coolest thing ever back then!

McKay's oldest brother, Laron, and his family

Aunt Candace was so fun and took each kid around the rink a few times.  They loved it!

I just watched everyone skate since I wasn't feeling that great.  

After roller skating the men got to head out and have some fun on the 4 wheelers while the moms and kids went back to the house to play some more.  Their house was great and had lots of toys, movies, and games for the kids to play together.  The theater room was a big hit.

Sunday we went to church and then had a nice barbecue after as well as a really fun family home evening.  Laron and Michelle came up with family Jeopardy.  So we spent the afternoon and evening retelling fun Pace family memories.  The kids only lasted for so long through the game, but the adults had a blast listening to all the fun memories.

The "big" kids

Of course ice cream was the treat after family home evening.

As you can see we ate just a little bit of sugar at this family reunion. ;)

Our amazing hosts Candace and Chad

Then Monday we woke up early and drove home.  Or in our case back to my parents house in Utah to pick up McKay's car.  What a week it was!  There was lots more stuff that I didn't get on camera like all the yummy food we ate, playing outside in their their water feature catching frogs, and lots of visiting.  I wish I had done better with my camera!  But a huge thank you to Candace and Chad for planning everything and being wonderful hosts!  Such fun memories for our kids and wonderful family bonding time.  Truly awesome and I hope we can do it again!   

   

A Miscarriage

This post has been getting in my way.  I have been wanting to blog about more light hearted things (like how I am redoing my bedroom and am in LOVE with it) but then there has been this post that needed to be written.  Chronologically this is where it fits and as much as I don't love talking about it it needs to be written.  At least for posterity sake and probably for my sake as well.

From now on every time I go to the doctors and they ask about my pregnancies I will now answer I have had 4 pregnancies and 3 live births.  I never loved that question and now will hate it even more.

On August 17, 2015 I took a pregnancy test that came back positive.  I was really surprised since we weren't planning this pregnancy and everyone of our other children have taken some planning to get here.  This was the first time that I took a test without McKay being there with me so it got to be my little secret for a few hours before he got home and I broke the news to him.  He was so surprised too and very excited.  We both were, although my excitement came with some nerves.  I was really nervous about how the first trimester would go with the morning sickness and just lack of motivation in general.  Taking care of 3 kids and growing one in my belly needs A LOT of motivation to make it work.  But I buckled down and prepped for it.  Planned how meal time would go, coached myself about not feeling guilty for letting the house get a little messy and kept my schedule to the bare minimum.  I was ready, but the sickness never really came.  In fact there was only one day where I had to lay down for a few minutes or I thought I might get nauseous.  I didn't know what to think about this lack of morning sickness, but I definitely wasn't complaining!  This was going to be our first baby born in the spring and I was really excited about that since it definitely seems like an ideal time to have a baby.  I scheduled my first doctors appointment and looked forward to seeing a little heart beat.

Then a few weeks after taking that positive test we headed out to Colorado for a family reunion with McKay's siblings.  We were SO excited to hang out with everyone.  This was the first big reunion that they had ever done and I think we were all looking forward to lots of girl chats, cousins playing, and fun all around.  I debated and debated about telling his family before we left about the pregnancy, but something just kept holding me back so I decided to just keep quiet for a while.

Well sadly while we were on vacation I started spotting, then bleeding, then cramping.  I was scared from the second I saw blood because I just knew.  This pregnancy had not felt normal and bleeding in the first few weeks has never been normal for me.  I hung on for about a day but eventually spilled the beans to everyone.  Only an hour after I opened up about everything the cramping got bad enough that I didn't even want to stand up.  So we headed to the nearest emergency room to get things checked out.  IF there was still a baby in there I wanted to do all that I could to keep it safe and healthy.

So off to the hospital we went.  After many blood tests and a pelvic exam and finally an ultrasound they discovered that there was just an empty sac inside with no growing baby.  It really felt like a cruel joke and we were so sad that this baby was not meant to be.  I am not very good at handling these kind of sad situations, but I feel like our very LONG visit at the hospital really helped us talk about and realize the situation that we were in.  We were sad, but felt ok.  I was grateful that I was not very far along (7 weeks).  I also really felt like the fact that there was never actually a living baby inside my body helped me not be too sad.  So we snuggled baby Declin that got to come with us and showed him off to all the nurses.  

After leaving the hospital they just had me let the miscarriage run its course.  With the help of ibuprofen I tried to keep the cramping and bleeding to a minimum while we tried to enjoy the rest of our vacation.  The day after the hospital was probably the worst and I had a splitting headache that made it hard to do anything along with the intense cramps.  But McKay's family was an amazing support to us, truly I am SO grateful for the help and love that they showed to us.  I wasn't a huge help with all of the cooking and cleaning that comes with a big gathering, but they picked up my slack and didn't complain.  They were there to distract us with all sort of fun things and they were there to talk when I needed to.  They are awesome and I am so glad we get to be family. :)  

I realize for many this is nothing.  There are so many worse situations out there and I have no room to complain or ask for your pity.  But I do think this needed to be said, talked about and shared.  While not a big deal it still happened and it hurt.  I am grateful for the healing that has come little by little.  I know we will have more kids some day and we look forward to that day.  At least I will be grateful next time I get morning sickness because that will mean that I will actually be pregnant.  :)

But for now I will just snuggle these cuties and count my blessings.  Truly they are the greatest and completely worth it.

 
            

Camping with Friends

Hello, it has been a while.  We have been doing lots the past few weeks and it is time to document it all.  I am going to try and go in order so we will start with our ward camp out that we went to 2 weeks ago.  Oh and I still want to dedicate a post to Adalyn since she recently turned 4 so don't let me forget that.  :)

This was our first ward camp out that we have been to with children.  The camp out was held at warm river camp ground.  I feel like we got brave this summer with camping and we have gone several times.  Wahoo! Maybe next year we will even go for more then 1 night at a time... maybe.

So I wasn't too worried about this camping experience until we got there and realized that I had left Declin's pack and play at home.  WHY?!  Was I trying to make things difficult?  So that night we had to muddle through with Declin sleeping between McKay and I.  He did eventually and I got a few hours of sleep as well.  Other then that little mix up things went smoothly.  The camp out had a great turn out and there were lots of friends for my older kids to play with.  Our ward has such a good mix of ages right now.  It is a lot of fun!  Although, Declin was the youngest at the camp out so maybe that should have been a sign for me too...  Camping with crawling babies is really not very fun so Declin spent most of his time being toted around by daddy.

The first evening there we just had dinner and then had a little program around the camp fire.  The kids thought all of our girls camp songs were pretty funny.  

Then on Saturday we had breakfast, went on a hike, and tried to play in the river.  The water was freezing so the kids were not very excited to jump right in.  Eventually we did get them to float the river with their friend Maylee.  Luckily the water was really shallow so mommy could just watch from the side.

After floating the river once, Jensen decided this was as close to the cold water as he wanted to get.  But Adalyn loved it and went several times.    

 

By this point Declin was SO tired after his late night party with mommy so he crashed on our walk.  Such a tired boy.

The girls got creative with some leaves and started making costumes for each other.  Adalyn was in heaven with all of the older girls dressing her up.  This was only half way through the makeover.  The rest of the costume included a leaf skirt.

Jensen just wanted to play with everyone else's toys and throw rocks into the water.  

We are grateful for a fun ward family who takes such good care of us.