This blog is so neglected. But does anyone even blog anymore? If I ever get a chance I am going to look into that. Because I miss blogging, and reading my friend's blogs and discovering new blogs. When did we all get too busy to blog anymore?
3 of my 5 kids are out of the house right now and the baby is sleeping so I will try to bust this post out as quickly as I can.
In April we moved to Cedar Hills. We weren't planning on moving to Utah County. No right minded Ute fan ever plans on moving to BYU country. But we were not finding a lot that we could afford and fit into in Sandy and we happened to come across a cute house in a gorgeous area with a view of the mountains that is completely breathtaking, so we had to let go of all of our preconceived notions about Utah County and take the plunge. And so far we LOVE where we live!! Like, we have not missed Sandy even once and we wake up every morning saying, "We are so lucky to live here!" On our first day here the boys each made new best friends. On any given night there can be 20 different kids in our backyard. Our immediate group of neighbors are all very nice (and are Ute fans) and our ward has been so good about making us feel welcome and including our kids in things right off the bat. I seriously could not be happier with where we ended up. It makes the 4 years that we lived in that run down rental so worth it.
*we don't miss Sandy or our house. But we do dearly miss our friends and neighbors and school. We take comfort in knowing they are all only a 30 min drive away.
Here is our house-
And these are our views-
The views from our bedroom bay window.
The view from Layla's room
The view from the boy's room
We have a pond right next to our golf course and the kids talked me into going over there to feed the ducks one night. I was so awestruck by the view I had of the mountains and Utah lake and the gorgeous golf course right from our neighborhood. AF canyon is a 10 min walk and 2 min drive from our front door. I am in heaven!!
I will post before and after pics of all we are doing to change the house, and pics of the rooms on another day. Maybe.
Our kids have so many friends now. I can't even count how many kids there are on our street. And I've never seen so many kids in one ward. Our kids are in heaven. Especially Easton, who had a very small selection of friends in Sandy.
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| Our first afternoon here our boys made friends with our next door neighbors and a soccer game quickly ensued. |
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| Sometimes Kendrick can't park in our driveway after work because there are revolving games of speed and horse going on in ours and our next door neighbor's driveways. |
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| Our next door neighbors have a girl that is between Taylor and the twins age. She plays with all of our kids. We love her! We want to adopt her. She also has a 14 year old brother, 5 year old sister and 2 year old brother. Our kids and their kids play for hours and hours each day and some days only come in to drink and pee. This picture makes me happy. |
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| For our Anniversary we bought ourselves an outdoor dining set. It is most often used by Taylor and the neighborhood kids to play games on. I can sit in my recliner downstairs and look out the door and see this and I LOVE it! |
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| The people who used to live here left us their teeter totter. It's a huge hit. A few days a week I will get knocks on the door from neighborhood kids asking permission to play on it. |
On Memorial Day I had a baby. Miss Layla Campbell was reluctantly born at 4:10 am. She just didn't want to leave my belly. In fact, I must have one luxurious freaking womb because I have had to evict all 5 of my babies. And Layla was the most stubborn of all. It took two rounds of Pitocin, then 6 hours of active labor and an hour of active pushing to get her out. She was my first labor and delivery without an epidural and I have to be honest-it wasn't great. All those women who say that giving birth naturally is beautiful and wonderful and that you recover so much faster afterward are totally full of IT. It hurt like hell, my recovery was worse and more painful then any of my other deliveries and I honestly felt like I had PTSD for a few weeks after. And to be clear, my distaste for my experience was just because of the delivery. The labor was doable. I handled that fine. It was the sensation to push and then being told that I couldn't push because the doctor wasn't there yet and then finally being given the okay to push and having two episiotomies, a post partum hemorrhage, and losing a liter of blood that made me hate natural childbirth. Part of the reason I did it was so that I could have that "euphoric" feeling at the end-yeah, never had that. I also was told that I would recover quicker and be able to walk around right away. Nope. Had to stay off my feet for 4 hours after the delivery because of my blood loss and had to have a catheter inserted. When she was almost 2 weeks old I was still bleeding very heavy and was scared to death when one day I started passing blood clots as big as golf balls. The whole natural childbirth movement is not for me and I intend to write Ricki Lake a strongly worded letter when I feel like myself again because her documentary is very misleading. If I could give my girls any advice before they have kids it would be, "get the freaking epidural the minute you get to the hospital!"
Now, having gotten all of that out of my system: Layla is 6 1/2 weeks old and perfect!
There is always that fear when you are 9 months pregnant and about to meet the child that has been living inside you, that maybe you really have been growing an alien, and what on earth will you do if the child comes out actually looking like one? But Miss Layla was a beauty from the moment she was born. This baby that I wasn't planning on, that made me sick for 5 months straight, and who threw a wrench in our living, vacation and work plans has been more than worth it. I sometimes worry about the age gap of our kids and fear that she will grow up feeling lonely while her older siblings are off at college, working, dating and not having time to play with their baby sister, but she had to have known that that's what she would be coming into and yet she still chose us to come to us. I don't know if I'll ever understand the timing of it all and why she joined our family when she did, but we couldn't be more happy that she is here!
