We want to keep you updated on our recent adventures as we haven’t blogged in awhile. We unfortunately haven’t had any vacations to any exciting places recently and there are a few reasons why. Firstly Alyssa had to go back to teaching a couple weeks earlier than most schools and our summer was cut short. Secondly, it’s difficult to travel when you are expecting a child on the way, due in early April. And Thirdly, Skylar is pursuing a career in aviation because he loves to be up in the sky rather than pursuing his office job with Web Design. That doesn’t mean that he is finished with web design, he is just slowly transitioning to become a pilot. Currently he is rated as a student pilot and soon do his check ride to become a private pilot where he can take friends and family up. With those things in mind we have been stricter on our spending budgets and haven’t traveled that much. When Skylar gets his ratings and after the baby is born we may start traveling by airplane more than Prius. We still have 9 more baseball stadiums we need to see to complete our baseball stadium journey.
Baby! After what seemed like an eternity (a couple years) of watching our close friends pop out little angels and for some a few little angels, we were sad that we weren’t having any luck of our own. It also didn’t help when many family members asked us when we were going to have one of our own. It just wasn’t our timing I guess. It was definitely harder on Alyssa than it was for me. We even started thinking of adopting but I didn’t like that idea. After a couple years and reading many difficult stories of how others were going with their pregnancies we decided to ask for help. We decide to contact fertility specialist (and uncle) Dr. Larry and his team to help. He recommended that we try to do in vitro fertilization.
After some time of planning we made the journey up to Utah, took a bunch of tests, waited, then went through the procedure and waited some more as well as did some exploring as seen by the pictures here:
A couple weeks later we were sad and disappointed to see a negative result, especially after all that we went through to get to that point and a lot of money spent. It was a tough loss but our hopes were not shut. Fortunately we had another vacation planned head which help bring our spirits up. Cruising through Alaska and Seattle helped us recover from this small difficult time. Being gone a couple weeks helped us feel great and rejuvenated.
Once we got back to California it was back to work again. It’s always a mental battle when it comes to getting back to work. Alyssa had to wake up early to head to work but this one morning took a little bit longer for her. She took a test and the result surprised us with a positive. We were so happy but we also were a little worried with the fact that it could be a false positive. After a couple more tests later we were smiling ear to ear. Now 21 weeks into the pregnancy we are happy to report we are having a beautiful baby girl! Alyssa is doing great and is beyond happy to be out of the beginning stages of morning sickness and into the more fun phases like growing a belly, haha. She was able to keep it a secret from her students by means of flowy t-shirts until Halloween came. Then she decided to make a skeleton shirt with a skeleton baby on it. Unfortunately it wasn’t really a costume, so some of her students were sad she didn’t actually dress up like everyone else did but they were happy to hear the good news, some students even gave gifts to congratulate her.
We were hoping to find the gender of our baby in October but the baby wasn’t cooperating with us and we had to wait until mid November to find out what we are having. We even made a video of the gender reveal even though we already knew from the ultra-sound from the day before. We didn’t tell anyone that day since Skylar really wanted to have a fun way to surprise everyone. See our 30 second video below of our gender reveal.
The funniest part of this was the confetti in the balloon being too heavy to let the balloon actually float so we had to tape it to the ceiling to keep it up. We were just happy the balloon didn’t pop before filming it. We then sent the video to our families and shared the great news.
These past couple of months have been quite hectic with gaining a new nephew named Fin, birthday celebrations, Dodgers in the World Series, and Isaac playing his final year of basketball and it’s only the beginning of December.