Freckle Eye Fancy

I wrote weekend s , like Brandon and I actually have had more than one weekend with zero plans, but this past weekend was the first we've had in a really, really long time! We didn't even go up to Logan, which was unusual. We usually either have a lot of things to do at home, or we make a trip to go see the babies. This weekend, we didn't do either. Friday night, Brandon went to a movie with some guys from work, and I hung out with a friend until her husband got home. Then I treated myself to Costa, and watched Riverdale until Brandon got home. (Does anyone else watch Riverdale? Why am I so obsessed with it??) The next morning, we slept in a bit, ran to Walmart for some breakfast stuff, cleaned the house real quick, showered, and put our pj's right back on. We sat down to watch Parks and Rec around 2:00, and I fell asleep probably around 3:30. After a two hour nap, we went to Firehouse Subs for dinner, then went up to Daybreak to walk around the lake. We were feeling...

I know I'm posting a lot this week, but apparently I have a lot on my mind.  I wasn't sure how the 39 week mark would affect me. I knew it would be hard, but I can't decide if it has been harder or easier than I imagined. It honestly blows my mind that it has been nine months since we lost Carter. The pregnancy went extremely fast, and the time after has done the same. Almost too fast for my liking sometimes. Some days I wish I could just slow everything down and take more time to grieve, especially since losing little bean. I wish I could go and spend more time at the cemetery. I wish I could do everything in the comfort of the nursery every day. But what I wish most is that I was mothering a live child. That, rather than sitting at the cemetery, we could be sitting at a park. Rather than taking time to grieve, we could be taking time to snuggle. Rather than sitting in the nursery, I'd be chasing a crawling baby all over the house. There are so many things I wish co...

It has been nine months since you were born. October 27, 2016. I wish we could take one of those “nine month” pictures. The kind where I hold you roughly where you hung out in my belly, and then we put it next to the very last picture of my pregnant belly and compare the two. I wish we could be doing that. There are so many things I wish I could be doing with you today. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it a million times, but I think it’s extremely unfair that Thursdays still exist. And that the 27th of each month exists. It’s the worst when they happen to be the exact same day. Now it has happened twice. Not only is today the 27th, and a Thursday, and exactly nine months, but it also marks thirty-nine weeks since the day you were born. The same number of weeks I was pregnant when we lost you. A huge part of me can’t believe that it has already been 39 weeks. This time last year we were 25 weeks along, and your little kicks were starting to get so strong. We started setting up the ...

May 8, 2017 Hi baby H, I started feeling really brave this weekend about welcoming you into the world. Looking at boy things is still a little hard, so I mostly looked at girl things yesterday, but I felt like it was a pretty big step. I looked at crib sheets, and a few outfits, and I was even okay to flip through the small Carter’s catalog that came to our house. If you are a boy, then I will eventually be okay to look at boy things, but maybe not right away. There are lots of fun girl things for if you are a girl, though! I can’t believe we find out in at most nine days whether you are a little boy or girl. I know we were planning to wait until we were seventeen weeks, which would mean we’d still have 21 days, but that’s hardly anything! We leave for Disney World in 17 days, and then we get to announce you to the world! I’m so excited to go on a vacation with just your dad, and to take you on your first Disney trip! We’ll do all sorts of fun things and eat all the best food, since...

A year ago this week, we set up the crib and dresser in Carter's room. We ordered some art for the walls, and hung up curtains that were the perfect shade of blue. I realized right after we lost him that I never shared pictures of his room. As we started thinking about a nursery for our little girl, I kind of had anxiety about redoing the nursery. The nursery has been my sanctuary since we lost him, and once that room changes, where would I go when I need to grieve? Unluckily, the nursery is still not changing for at least nine months. But I thought I should share pictures. It's pretty simple, but it's the most put together room in the house, besides the two picture frames that hold someone else's photos (and a baby, that one kills me). We have spent so much time in the nursery that it's honestly my very favorite room. I never would have imagined that it would sit empty for as long as it has, but I'm glad we have the space to honor our babies. [caption ...

I wrote this post on our way home from Amsterdam, and still think about this day a lot. I'm so grateful for these little signs from our babies! Being on vacation for a week was hard. It was super fun, don't get me wrong, but it was hard to be away from home and our boy for so long. I feel him the most at home, and that feeling fades just a little whenever I leave the house. After days of no routine, little sleep, and anxiety from just being outside my current comfort zone, I broke down. I just wanted to go home and be with him. One night, while I laid in bed for hours trying to fall asleep, I asked to be given a sign that he was there with us. Actually, I kind of begged. I just needed something. The next day, there was nothing. I went back to the hotel sad, but still hoping that something would show up. That night, I got the most sleep of the entire trip. The next afternoon, we were wandering around the Amsterdam City museum, learning about the history of the city, and saw t...

Before we left for Disney, I had the idea to do a drink tour. There are tons of posts online about drinking around the world at Epcot, and the best places to get beer at the parks, but we kind of had to sift through a lot of posts to compile a list of the best non-alcoholic drinks. I'm sure there are a ton more, but we had to alternate our specialty drinks with water (and obviously Mickey pretzels), so our list isn't extremely long. And sorry we didn't get a picture of every single drink (thanks to The Disney Food Blog for providing some of these!). I promise they are all worth it! If you know of any that aren't on this list, put them in the comments! Magic Kingdom Lefou's Brew - Gaston's Tavern (by Be Our Guest restaurant) : Tasty frozen apple juice (and a hint of marshmallow!) topped with passion fruit-mango foam. Enjoy it while you gaze with wonder at the antlers Gaston uses in all his decorating. Dole Whip Float - Aloha Isle (Adventureland b...

This post is from the day we did our blood draw to do genetic testing, and in turn, find out the gender. It was probably one of the happiest days I'd had since we found out we were pregnant again. May 3, 2017 Little baby H, I guess I can call you that now, because regardless of your gender, you are going to be baby H! That’s so crazy!! I’ll have to tell your daddy as soon as he stops being so busy with work this morning. This past week has been fairly uneventful with you. I’m starting to feel actually pregnant already, which is a big change compared to last time. I know they say you get bigger with each pregnancy, but I did not expect to feel this big already! But I don’t remember when I started to not be able to do up my pants last year haha. I still can do them up now, but they are getting uncomfortable. I would guess just a couple more weeks and we’ll be using a hair tie. It’s starting to get warm outside anyway, so forget pants and bring on the skirts! I haven’t been quite a...

I'm not exactly sure what happened, but about a month ago, our subscriber emails stopped working. Unfortunately, we didn't catch it until today (thanks to an email from my grandma). But I think we got it figured out, and we're back up and running! When I ran the validation today, it gave me an error on one of my posts, that stopped the RSS feed, therefore breaking the ability to send out the emails. I've learned a lot of techy things in the last three hours haha. But we're back! And hopefully you still love us even though you haven't been getting the email updates. 

This weekend was super nice, and very much needed after the busy month we've had so far. An hour after we got home from Boise last weekend, Brandon had to turn around and leave for Vegas for work. He got home Wednesday night and for the rest of the week/weekend we had really big plans to do absolutely nothing. Thursday afternoon we laid in bed and finished Big Little Lies (well, I finished it, Brandon napped). Friday was somehow relaxing and productive all at the same time. We got our Utah drivers licenses (which you're supposed to do before 60 days of living here but I feigned ignorance and held onto my Idaho license as long as I could!) and saw Spiderman that night. On the drive home from the movie, we saw a little rainbow in between the mountains on the east side of the valley. We ran home to grab our new camera, but by the time we got back outside, the rainbow had kind of started to spread and disappear, but we snapped a few pictures anyway. Then we drove back down the s...

April 26, 2017 Hi little bean! I always want to call you little babe, but that’s what we called Carter, and I don’t think I can use that term with you. Sorry. Still love you, but sorry. Today marks the end of the twelfth week of pregnancy! I still can’t believe it, and I kind of can’t believe that we are that far along either. It’s so crazy that essentially, we are already a third of the way through this pregnancy, since you’ll be joining us early. I know we’ve only known about you for seven weeks, but it has gone so fast. And really, we only have 3 ½ more seven week periods. It’s a weird way to think about things, but it works. The past five days have been better than Tuesday last week, but still kind of hard. We went to Logan on Saturday and saw your brother, and I don’t think I’ve ever missed him as much as I did that day. I want to have two kids at home, I don’t even care if you two were both at home and barely a year apart, I want that. It just doesn’t seem fair. Yesterday was ...

I had a whole nice post typed up, and then the page crashed and I'm too lazy to type it all again, so here's the quick version: We went to Boise for the weekend and really had a great time! We went to a wedding for one of my cheer babies (really. I was getting so emotional seeing her all grown up, even though she's only a year younger than I am), drove by our old house (which we miss a ton, turns out), and went to a baby shower on Saturday. The guys went shooting while us girls went to the shower, but stopped by toward the end. We did a big family dinner that night with all 12 of us that were there (parents, me & Brandon, brothers & s.o.'s, grandma, aunt, cousin & her husband. Later that night we played Bean Bazzled, a risky jelly bean game where one color could have one of two flavors. Good flavors include lime, tutti frutti, pear, caramel corn, and others, while bad flavors were stinky socks, dog food, spoiled milk, rotten eggs, vomit, booger and a few ...

I want to start out by saying that I've never been so legitimately sad to come back from a vacation. Yeah, it's always a bummer to come home, but I don't know that I've ever actually been sad to see it end. Not as sad as I was when we got home on Tuesday, anyway. This trip was so necessary, and so much fun and relaxing at the same time! We've had to make so many big decisions in the past nine months, so it was really nice that the only things we had to decide on this trip were what rides to ride next and where to eat. And also which snacks to get. (The answer was all of them). We stayed at Disney's All-Star Movies Resort. This was our first time staying on the Disney property as a married couple (we stayed at Saratoga Springs with my parents before we got married) and it was so nice! In the past, we've fumbled with airport shuttles, and shuttles to and from the park, but Disney just does everything right. They have a shuttle that picks you up and drops yo...

If you've been following the blog and are a little confused about anything, I'm here to clear it up for you. We found out we were pregnant with Little Bean on March 8th. That day, I started writing to her, and tried to write to her a couple times a week. We found out we had lost her on May 15th.  I am not currently pregnant . The vacation that was referred to in yesterday's post  was our trip to Amsterdam back in April. I had planned to share all these bumpdates after we announced our pregnancy, and felt no reason not to share them after we lost her. I know a couple people have been confused, but we are not currently pregnant. Trust me, when we are, you will definitely know. This is just a short little post, but I wanted to catch everyone up. So to recap: the bumpdates and posts that keep coming are only about little bean and our pregnancy that ended May 15th. There are only five more weeks of journals to little bean that I will be publishing, so after that, maybe it won...

April 19, 2017 I wasn’t very good about writing to you while we were on vacation last week, and I’m so sorry about that! We had the best time on vacation, and I love knowing that you were right there with us! So you have officially been to three other countries, and I think that’s pretty dang cool. Yesterday was a hard day. Monday night, I had a dream that I miscarried, and I couldn’t shake the thought of it all day. Then I found out that a lady I follow on instagram lost their baby six weeks into the pregnancy, and even though her pregnancy has nothing to do with ours, I turned into a big ball of anxiety. Our doctor isn’t in the office on Tuesdays, so I called the scheduling desk to see if there was any way we could go in for an ultrasound, and she couldn’t do it. I guess he has to order the ultrasound, and since he wasn’t there, he couldn’t. She understood that I was nervous, but she just kept telling me to relax, and that everything was going to be fine. And she might be right, b...