Christmas!

Before we took off to Disney we celebrated Christmas with my Dad and Grandma and Aunt Dee. The soup and cornbread were a hit!



The girls enjoyed their presents.


I got to spoil Grandpa.



And the girls got a lot of Brave stuff. The next morning we did Christmas from Tyler and I.

Pre Christmas

We got the girls some bunk beds to make room for another bed in their room. Ava was so excited!




Violet had a mini dance recital.



And we went ice skating at Campus Martius park in Downtown Detroit. It was really fun.

From 2013

Audrey came too!

Up North and Thanksgiving

We went up north with the Govern's early in November. It was so fun!

Here are the girls with an egg they found lying outside the hen's nest.



Riding KC. Ava even remembered his name!





Nothing like a dozen free freshly laid eggs! This was my highlight.



Ava on KC.



Nisha and Michelle working hard in the kitchen.



We probably had a dessert to person ratio of 4:1



One of the worst family photos in family history. (Except Ava)



At Dad's house. He cooked a turkey all by himself for us! Probably the last holiday at the house before he sells it in the spring.

Halloween

It was cold the day of Halloween. North had a bad cough. There was more dressing up at the YMCA party we went to.

Busy!

This is really what I've been up to for the past couple months. Mixing medications, injecting myself, learning how to assemble syringes. It's been a learning process. True, there has been Thanksgiving and Halloween, but fertility medications are super time consuming. I have to wake up at 6 am to get to the dr. (which is 30 min away) and wait to get blood work and internal ultrasounds done every other day. They then call me with the results and any adjustments to make with my medications. My response the first month wasn't that great, but the second month (this was early October) I had two follicles and Tyler's counts were great. So we gave it a great shot. The best we could do. But it didn't work. It's been a few weeks since we found out it didn't work. And I've just been settling in to what that means for our family and how it is going to grow. 

Really over the past few years I have "matured" but in a way I feel like the innocence of trying to conceive has been lost. All my naive notions of having an "oops" baby are gone. Laughing and being trite about how many children we have. Each one is a true miracle. I don't know how they got here to be honest. I used to cry every Sunday about trying to conceive. I don't anymore. All those emotions have been tempered. Which is good! This is a good thing!

Life goes on. It never occurred to me that some people when they can't conceive just say, "Okay, that's fine! Life goes on!" Wow. I am NOT like that. Or at least I wasn't. 

Now we are pursuing Foster Care and Adoption through the state. We have always known this was the plan for our family, we just didn't know when! So onward we go. I am not a quitter! No matter how hard it is!