Healing Field

Every year in Sandy a flag company puts up an American flag for every person that died on September 11th.

Being able to see this and get an idea of just how many lost their lives on that day is an extremely sobering and humbling experience.

Seeing these flags really put it in perspective how many people died, and you can't help but become a little angry and extremely saddened at it all.

This year they also revealed a monument of the iconic photo taken on 9/11 of the three fire fighters putting up the American flag in all the ruble, and it is amazing.

It's called hope rising. 

Each flag has a card attached to it that honors a person who died that day.

It has their name, age, location of their death and a small paragraph about that person, most were about why there were there on that day, or the things that they enjoyed in their life. They were extremely touching to say the least.

It was so neat to read about these people, you could spend days reading all of these cards.

The flags are on two separate fields that take up two city blocks and they categorize it by the place the person died.

They do this every year and I would definitely recommend going next year, it's amazing and very eye opening.

 Flags as far as you can see. Field 1

 Field 2.

 God Bless America.

This Time Around

Last post I did I was in a very big hurry and didn't have time to talk about the little announcement.

So today you get to hear all about it.

Today I am 13 weeks and 1 day, almost done with the first trimester!

HALLELUJAH 

When I was pregnant with Kale man I never got sick, I can remember the few times that I was sick and they were rare and few between.

I felt great pretty much my whole pregnancy with Kale (up until the end of course)

If your wondering what I mean read this post Kale's Birth Story

This time around has been night and day different.

At first I was exhausted all the time, no matter how much I slept.

Then a little while later the nausea hit... And it never seemed to go away.

Now the exhaustion and nausea is slowly dying out, but it has not been a pleasant last couple of weeks.
Remember a little while ago how I said I had excuses as to why I hadn't been keeping up on the blogging?
It's because I have been sick and so tired that when Kale goes down for a nap or bed time, I do too, therefore, no blog time.
But now that things are getting better the blog will not be ignored.

I must say thank you to Jon for helping me out so much lately.

For cleaning, cooking, and watching Kale when you get home from a 16 hour work day, you are the best babe.  

And also to my mom who has helped me so much throughout the day while Jon's at work and for letting us eat dinner with you because I don't feel like cooking.

Like I said things are slowly getting better, I am so excited to be done with the first trimester I can't even tell ya.

Sorry if I seem to be complaining a lot, just kind of how things have been lately.

We went to the doctor yesterday, I love going to the doctor!

I feel like a little kid on Christmas, you get to talk about your baby, hear your babies heartbeat, and get to watch your baby in your belly, what could be better than that?

I look forward to it every month.
Another exciting thing is we get to find out what our little person is on October 5th!
It's going to be here before I know it!
I am so excited to have another little one.
If I am being perfectly honest with you I am freaking out at the same time.
It is unbelievably overwhelming to think that in a few months I am going to have another baby.
Jon has been SO amazing with me and has helped me so much.
He knows how overwhelmed with all of this I am and he keeps me so level headed and grounded, I truly would be a wreck without him.
I don't want you all to think that I am not excited for this because I cannot wait, it's just a lot to handle and I'm sure you can all understand what I mean.
Happy last week of the first trimester :)
Little baby is almost three inches long and weighs an ounce.
Belly pics soon to come :)

Face Lift and an Announcement

It was time for a much needed change on the blog.

Like?

I do have one question that is driving me MAD

See how on the friends and family names and a few favorites names they look like they are bolded?

How on earth do you change those!? I have been sitting playing with every thing I can think of and nothing seems to work?

Any advice anyone?

I am desperate, it seriously will drive me mad.

On another note, if you have been on Facebook at all today you probably saw my little announcement that I am pregnant! Woohoo!

 I am 11 weeks and 3 days to be exact.

I can't tell you how excited/overwhelmed/happy I am.

But I will post a little more on this subject soon, there is much to be said. :)

Bear Lake

As I told you, we went up to Bear Lake for the weekend a little while ago and I totally spaced posting pics of our weekend.

We had a lot of fun even though we were only able to boat Saturday due to crappy weather.

The water is up so high this year, I haven't seen it like that since I was really little.

We were able to launch the boat from the dock right below the cabin.

Those of you who have been up there understand what I am talking about.

There is only about 15 feet of beach now, it's crazy.

It took us just a couple of tries to get this down, it's super fun.

 That hat was his best friend.

Sunday we took a little drive up to Bloomington Lake. 

It is gorgeous to say the least, and freezing cold.

These pics are only a tiny fraction of the lake but I can't find the rest of them for some reason, so what you see is what you get. :)

We had a ball in Bear Lake and I can't wait to go up again in a few days, cross your fingers that the weather will be better this time around so that we can go boating for more than one day.

MIA

Hello blogworld, it's been a while.

I have been MIA for a while now and I have some pretty good excuses as to why that I will be sharing with you soon.

It's just been crazy around here.

But here's a few things that have been going on as of lately.

We just finished the Ferguson reunion last night. 

We went up to snowbird with the fam and had a blast.

I got a new job. (Hallelujah)

Jon has been ridiculously busy, working full time plus over 15 hours of OT this week at XR3D plus who knows how many hours a day at Known.

We are headed up to Bear Lake this weekend and I'm stoked.

Those are just a few things of the craziness that's been going on as of lately, I will post lots and lots of pics very soon and catch up on everything.

killing me softly

The other day, I walked into the computer room to find this.

 Those are grandma's glasses he's sporting, while talking on the phone and holding a pencil.

He then continued to press buttons on the keyboard and click things all over the screen with the mouse like he was doing serious work. 

 It is so fun to watch him do things like that, that no one instigates and that he comes up with all on his own.

Today while brushing our teeth, he decided that he was going to brush his teeth and comb his hair at the same time.

Ya, he's a multi-tasker.

 A few days ago when he woke up from his nap he was very specific on what he wanted and how he wanted things and it went a little like this.

He did NOT want pants on

He wanted his flip flops on however.

He absolutely did NOT want a bum change.

He wanted Londy's sunglasses on.

And he wanted to go outside, the end. 

He was so adamant about this I couldn't help but laugh and except. 

So,

awesome bed head, pink sunglasses, and a right butt cheek hanging out later, we headed outside.

  Check out that get up.

Pretty sweet eh?

Don't worry, I did not take him into public like that. 

If I did I think people would be genuinely concerned. 

Dear Kale, you kill me.

(and I love it)

the best thing ever

 Like everyone said he would, Kale one day just started talking.

I was so stressed about him not talking, I should have known he would do it on his own time, just like he has with every single other milestone.

So you want to know the best thing ever?

When I whisper 

"I love you"

like I do every night as I'm tucking him into bed, and he whispers back

"love you mom"

Best thing ever.

Nothing melts your heart more than hearing those words from your sweet little one for the first time. 

I may have even shed a few tears.

I am so grateful for my sweet little man, I don't know what I would do without him.

My mother in law gave me a quote on a ceramic tile for Christmas, that I love so much 

It says:

"While we try to teach our children all about life,

Our children teach us what life is all about"

Nothing is truer, and any parent would agree with me.

I love you Kale man.

boys will be boys

I came outside the other day and found my boys up to no good.

 Pretty sure that is not safe, but Kale LOVED it so I let it slide.

What can I say, I'm a sucker for my boys.

ventilation time.

We had a blast this weekend in Bear Lake! I will be posting the few pictures I took of our trip soon.

But for today I am feeling a need to vent.

So you all know that I view my blog as sort of a journal of us three's lives?
Having said that,

I am going to be honest with you all and tell you things that bother me, make me mad, make me sad, and things that I think a lot of people wouldn't share so it doesn't ruin the "image" they are trying to portray.

I think here in Utah perfectionism is a MAJOR issue, especially in women.

So this is why I tell you things that bother me and make me angry, because I want you all to know that I am not perfect, I do not have a perfect family, and I do not have a perfect life.

Do I love my life?

With out a doubt, and I wouldn't change a thing.

But we aren't perfect.

So today I am going to share with you something that really bothers me.

Girls.

I have always had issues with girl friends. 

That is why I would hang out with mainly guys in high school, I just couldn't take the drama for too long.

And when I got out of high school and got pregnant, I felt like a lot of my closest friends abandoned me.

Do you ever feel like no one gives a crap about you?

That is how I felt, (and sometimes still feel) about certain people.

And it just plain pisses me off.

I finally have gotten to a point where I am done putting in the effort to try and keep this "friendship" going and I try to forget about it.

But it still hurts deep down to feel not cared about by close friends that I still care deeply about.

 I totally understand that not all friend ships last, I guess the thing that bothers me is how people can just not care when we grew apart, after how close we had been.

Now, I am not writing this to get a pity party.

That is not the point I want to get across here.

 One reason I am writing this is to tell you how grateful I am for those girls who have been there for me these past few years.

Jamie, Ash, Brooke, and Karin.

Thanks girls, I love ya.

And of course I wouldn't be here without my family.

All my cousins, (you know who you are) my mom, sister, Mazee,

and all the Ferg sisters (including Renae, Shell and Kath)

Enough said, you get the point. 

 Thanks for listening to me vent everyone, I bet a lot of you feel the same way about some girl friends as well?

Well I can now say LET IT OUT, it feels a lot better :)

Kale's Birth Story

Happy Friday everyone!

Prepare yourself for a very long post.

Today we are headed out to Bear Lake with my family and I can't wait.

It is with out a doubt one of my most favorite places to go to.

Well today I thought I should share a little story with you all.

We spoke in sacrament meeting last Sunday on hope and I thought it would be fun to share my talk with you all.

Now keep in mind that this is a very revised version from the one I gave in sacrament meeting, I have added a lot of things and taken some things out.

I left out most of the intro, but thought it would be fun if you knew a little background about us so there is a little in there too.

So here is the story of Kale's birth, enjoy!

 

Me and Jonathan went to the same pre-school together, here in Bountiful and we lived just down the street from him and his family. My family then moved to Kaysville for a while and then moved back to Bountiful when I was in the middle of first grade and I have been here ever since. Jon and I went to Adelaide Elementary, South Davis Junior High, and Woods Cross High all together. 

We started dating  in 9th grade and stuck together pretty much all through High school. We were married on October 2, 2008 at Eldridge Manor. We were then sealed in the Bountiful temple on October 2, 2009 for time and all eternity along with our sweet little boy Kale.

The topic we have been given today is hope. The first thing that came to mind when I thought about this topic is having hope and faith in the Lord. I came across a scripture seemed to sum it up pretty well. It is in Jeremiah chapter 17 verse 7 and it reads:

Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. 

In other words if we trust and have hope in the Lord we will be blessed, pretty easy and self explanatory right?

Well then I got thinking to myself, so why do we ever doubt the Lord, and lose hope and faith in Him? Why is it so easy to fall away?

Shortly after me and Jon were married we were trying to figure out what to do for insurance for when Kale was born. We couldn’t get on any regular insurance plan because I was already pregnant and my pregnancy wouldn’t be covered because it’s considered a pre-existing condition. We were trying to get any financial aid that we could and nothing was working out. We were told to apply for medicaid, so we did, and we were denied. At the time that we applied for medicaid we were not paying our tithing for one reason or another. Being newlyweds we found it extremely difficult to pay or tithing.

 We had no clue what to, we had come to the conclusion that we were just going to have to pay completely out of pocket for everything. 

I was 32 weeks along and went in to the doctor to have one of my regular check ups. My doctor came in and said that my blood pressure was pretty high. She then went on to ask if I had been having any symptoms such as headaches, a pain in my right ribs, weird things with my vision and being very light headed. 

And me being the nonchalant happy little pregnant girl I didn’t think twice about it an replied nope! 

She told me about a condition called preeclampsia that is common in teenage pregnancies, again I didn’t think twice about it.

We got out of the doctors appointment and Jon turned to me and said Emily why did you say no to all of those questions she asked you? You have been complaining non-stop about every single one of those things. 

It took me a sec and then went huh... I guess I have haven’t I. So I didn’t let it bother me too much, and headed back to work. Very shortly after I got back, I got another one of those dizzy light headed spells where I saw weird flashing lights. 

I got on the internet and looked up preeclampsia and found this:

Preeclampsia is a complex disorder that affects about 5 percent of pregnant women. You're diagnosed with preeclampsia if you have high blood pressure and protein in your urine after 20 weeks of pregnancy.

The condition most commonly shows up after you've reached 37 weeks, but it can develop any time in the second half of pregnancy, including during labor or even after delivery (usually in the first 48 hours)

Preeclampsia can range from mild to severe, and it can progress slowly or rapidly. The only way to get better is to deliver your baby.

Reading this and after my little episode I was totally freaked out so I called my doctor back and had to explain to her that I was an idiot I really had been having all of those symptoms she explained to me earlier. She said to come back in and we would do a simple blood test to see what it came up with. 

Back to the hospital we went, I got the blood test, and we headed back home. On our way home my doctor called me and said your blood tests came back abnormal pack your bags and check into labor and delivery, don’t be too alarmed, we just need to run more tests, it’s probably nothing.

Well, that was a fun ride home, me balling my eyes out because I’m terrified and Jon in shock not really knowing what to think. Like I said I was 32 weeks along, I still had 8 weeks (two months) of pregnancy to go. I remember kneeling down with Jon and having a prayer that everything would be ok... having hope that everything would be ok.

We got home, hurried and packed the essentials, took our dog up to my parents house and now for the third time that day headed out to Murray to go to the hospital. 

They checked me in and said that they wouldn’t know if I had preeclampsia for sure for a while and that it is hard to actually diagnose preeclampsia. We were at the hospital for over a day and a half before they confirmed that it was preeclampsia and that it was advanced enough that they had to induce me. 

They gave me shots of corticosteroids to develop Kale’s lungs and they started me on a drug called magnesium which is to prevent seizures because with preeclampsia and having such high blood pressure you are very likely to have seizures. Let me tell ya magnesium is evil stuff, it makes you feel absolutely awful every sickness you can think of, it makes you feel that way. I have never felt that way in my entire life. The worst part of the magnesium is, is because of it I don't remember a lot of this experience.

I remember we were both so stressed out about what we were going to do about insurance because the hospital told us that Kale would be going to the NICU being so premature which is unbelievably expensive, not to mention my five day stay in the hospital.

There were definitely times where I thought why me, why us? Why should this happen to us when we are so unprepared, so young, I didn’t know what to do. It is amazing how satan can make us think why me, why now and loose all our hope and faith in the Lord. 

Well Kale was born February 13th after four days of being in the hospital. He weighed in at 4lbs 11oz which was surprisingly big for how premature he was (they predicted he would weigh around three pounds) and he was pretty healthy, he didn’t even have to be on oxygen which was a feat in itself, it amazed all the nurses and doctors.

About a day before Kale was born a lady from the hospitals accounting department came in and said why don’t you try applying for medicaid? We told her that we already had and that we were denied. She said to try applying again, we didn’t know why she wanted us to when we had already been denied once but we did as she said and applied again. 

Kale was in the NICU for exactly one month. That one month was with out a doubt the most difficult of our lives, having a precious little boy that we had to leave every single day. Not knowing if he would be ok, not knowing if something was going to happen while we weren't there. It was awful.  It had plenty of ups and downs.

And throughout all of it the thought of how are we going to pay for this? What are we going to do? Was looming in the back of our minds.

 Kale was doing relatively well for about 2 weeks then they found out that Kale had NEC. Nec is short for necrotizing enterocolitis  which is an infection of the intestines that premature babies can get. It can lead to major surgery and often death, not to mention he couldn’t eat for a week...Can you imagine a newborn that can’t eat for a week? I can tell you it is not fun. Again, our hope and faith was tested. 

I remember I was alone at the hospital when they found this out, Jon was at work. And I hadn’t really cried through this whole experience but when they told me this I broke down. I left and went into a private room and just cried to myself. I had to leave anyways because the doctors were putting in a picc line. A pic line is just like an iv except for it starts in the right bicep area and they run the picc all the way up the arm, across the chest and into the opening of the heart. ( I hope all my medical terminology is correct here)

The reason for doing this is because Kale's veins were so small and fragile that they kept collapsing so they couldn't get the needed medication into him.

They had basically used every sing vein they could in his little body (even his forehead) and nothing worked.

It just so happened that right when he needed a picc line he got diagnosed with NEC as well.

While I was crying to myself in the pumping room (yes I was in the pumping room) I just kept asking why? Why does this have happen to him when he has been through so much already, it just isn’t fair to him. Why can’t it just be easy for him?

That night, Jon’s dad came and gave Kale a blessing that everything would be ok and that he would grow strong and would be able to come home soon. I remember feeling so at peace and I just knew that everything would be ok. I got a little hope back.

Kale came home a few weeks later, after being in the NICU for exactly one month, the day he came home he weighed exactly five pounds.

Another blessing that brought back hope, we found out shortly after that that we had been approved for medicaid. We were baffled to say the least. Nothing had changed so why now were blessed with this? Then we realized, it’s because we we had started paying our tithing. That is the only reason that we got approved, we DID NOT QUALIFY but yet we still got it. Needless to say that when all of our bills came and were all counted up the grand total was WELL OVER 100 thousand dollars. 

And there are plenty of friends who have seen the bills who can vouch that it is true :)

Kale is now an extremely healthy and crazy two year old. He has more energy than he knows what to do with but he is the sweetest little man I’ve ever met. 

I know with all my heart that the reason why Kale got better and strong so quickly, and the only reason why we got insurance was all because of the Lord. I know that He has a hand in everything and that if we have hope in Him everything will turn out ok. 

I remember turning often during this experience to a scripture that I was given back in Young Womens. It is from Isaiah 41: verses 10 and 13

Fear not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness. 

For I the Lord thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee.

Well there you have it, Kale man's story in a nutshell. 

If you made it this far congratulations,

You deserve a cookie.

And hopefully this may strengthen your testimony of tithing, hope and faith a little bit and if not, hopefully you just enjoyed it.

I sure know that even though this was with out a doubt the biggest trial in my life so far it also strengthened my testimony more than anything ever has.  And I am grateful for it.

I am so grateful for a healthy little boy, the best husband I could ever ask for, and knowing that no matter what the Lord is on my side.