The best year and the worst year...all in one

Since I'm new at this blogging thing, I thought I'd to a little re-cap of what 2010 was for me.  If you've read my last 2 posts you probably know what some of those things were.  However there was lots of stuff in between those events.

Lets actually start with December 31st, 2009.  Up until that day we had been seeing a crappy fertility Dr. We had been told that our only option was to do IVF.  We decided to take a little break from all of it, when somebody told us about another Dr. to try.  So, we had our first appointment with him on New Years Eve Day 2009.  He is a true Miracle worker!  We came home from our appointment and rang in the new year with some of our best friends.

January 2010 brought one of the best gifts, EVER!  My first niece, on my side...we have 13 on hubby's side, was born.  On January 7th this precious baby girl became apart of my life:

 

February 2010 brought, besides our wedding day, the best day of our lives.  After just 2 cycles with our new Dr. we were thrilled to find out that we were pregnant!!!

March 2010 we had so much fun sharing our news with family and friends

April 2010  This sweet little thing celebrated her first Easter.  Yes I bought her those ears. Love her face in these pictures!

May 2010 I got sooo many sweet Mother's Day cards from friends and family!

June 2010 We live right by the river and spend most of our weekends doing something like this:

July 2010 we found out our sweet little baby was a BOY!  We were both trilled.  It didn't take us long to pick a name.  Clint's dad, Bruce, died when Clint was 9.  Clint always said if had a boy his middle name would be Bruce, I thought it was perfect, so Nolan Bruce it was!  July also brought our annual camp out with great friends.  We always have a themed night, this year was Disney.  Since I was pregnant and could not partake in any drinking my desire to dress up this year was no where to be found:

Just to be fair to my friends here is a photo from the year before, yes the theme was 80's:

August 2010 the worst month of our entire year, and our lives.  On August 3rd we went to my routine 24 week OB check.  Our Dr. could not find the heartbeat using the doppler. Right away I felt like something was wrong.  The nurse went and got the ultrasound machine.  I could tell immediately by the look on our sweet Dr.'s face what he was going to say.    I will NEVER forget those moments, the feelings, the smell of the clinic, the looks on everyone's faces, seeing my husband sob harder than I had ever seen him cry, the way he held me, everything... We went home with instructions to return the next day to be induced.  We left with so many things going through our heads.  Where would I get the strength to go through labor?  Do you have a funeral?  Can he still be baptized?  All sorts of things.  Thanks to our amazing family and friends they helped us through all of these things.  I was induced at 7:00 on 8/4/10 and at 6:00am on 8/5/10 our angel was born.

He was baptized:

We did have a funeral.  A beautiful graveside ceremony with our closest friends and family:

We all released blue balloons:

My sister wrote and read the most beautiful poem:

He was buried directly above Clint's dad,  Nolan's Grandpa.  Perfect.

September 2010 Clint's youngest brother got married.  It was a gorgeous day.  I gained my "favorite" Sister-in-law that day to!

October 2010 Kirsten and our puppy had their first Halloween:

And... our God Daugher and Niece Madyson was baptized:

November 2010 Hmmm...can't think of anything too exciting that happened.  We made it through our "due date" and Thanksgiving.

December 2010

Wow!  I guess it is possible to have the best year and the worst year all in one!  We are ready to say goodbye to 2010 and are hopeful that 2011 will be the best to come.  The weather here is awful, very icy!  We aren't sure if this is going to stop our plans yet or not.  Happy New Year's to all of you, may 2011 treat you well!
Kari

Christmas

I can't believe Christmas is here and gone already, wow!  We had a pretty good Christmas.  Not going to lie it was a pretty hard Christmas too.  This was supposed to be Nolan's first Christmas, he and my niece Kirsten were supposed to celebrate their first Christmas together.  We so enjoyed being around family even though our hearts were missing our sweet little baby.
My mom, who is a nurse, had to work this Christmas.  So we celebrated Christmas with my family on the 23rd instead.  Oh it was soooo fun to watch Kirsten open her gifts.  No, she was not spoiled at all this year, big lie:)
On Christmas Eve we drove to my Sister-in-laws house.  She lives about 4 hours away.  Since 4 out of 6 of my husbands brothers and sisters all live here they usually travel here.  It was nice to be able to go visit them for a change.  We stayed over with them that night and got up the next day to drive another hour from where we were to spend Christmas day with Clint's uncle.  This is so not a typical Christmas for us, we rarely travel and usually get together with our families here.  I think the fact that we didn't do our traditional Christmas routines and since we were soooo busy traveling it made Christmas a little bit easier.  We still have one more Christmas, but not until January 9th.  That will be with my mom's extended family!
I wasn't very good about taking pictures this weekend, sorry!  But I do have a few pics from this Christmas season to share:

Our Christmas Tree

Us and our sweet puppy, Nevaeh.  Yes, that is Heaven backwards, I will have to share the story of how we got our puppy another time ;)

I made this, with a little help from my husband, for my aunt for Christmas.  I cut out the stars all by myself!!!!

A close up of one of the stars

Clint helped make this for my dad, he loves his Jack Daniels.  No I am not calling him a drunk, he just really likes it, ha!  We thought this would be fun for him to have in his office at home.

I also made a really neat gift for my mom, but the only pics I have are on my phone.  I do not have a fancy phone so I don't even know how to get the pictures off of it.  I'll take a pic when I am at her house next!

I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas,
Kari

I did it, I finally created a blog...

Welcome to, Our Little Country Life!  I hope you've had a chance to read the about me section.  It pretty much puts the last 2 years of my life in a nut shell!  I am excited to start blogging.  My sister, a blogger veteran, has been nagging encouraging me to do it for quite some time now!  

As soon as our infertility journey began my sister started sharing blogs with me to read.  Blogs about people who had been down that same road.  Reading their stories gave me so much hope for my situation.  Hearing their frustrations and knowing that I wasn't the only one with feelings like I had was medicine for my heart.  After our first baby was stillborn I read about other people who have suffered through loosing babies as well.  I am hopeful that having a blog of my own will be a source of therapy for me.  If I'm lucky maybe my blog will help or touch somebody else!

I hope/plan to use this blog as a journal, one that will be fun to look back on.  I like to cook and bake so I plan to share some favorite recipes... and maybe some flops to ;)  I have taken up a new hobby of making primitive decorations and crafts.  I am no where near good but maybe I'll show you what I've been up to.  I have a few homemade Christmas gifts this year that I am pretty proud of.  


Well, that is it for my introduction.  I'll share more about me and our little country life soon ;)


-Kari