Happy 8th Birthday Gigi

Of all my babies, Gracen is the one most confident in who they are.  Free spirit, wildflower, wild child of mine...I pray you always keep your confidence, your innocence and most importantly that infamous FIRE.  I love you baby girl.

Happy 5th Birthday Hayes

Sweetest guy on earth is a whole hand today!  Happy birthday baby boy, you are so loved.

A decade of Leighton Layne

A decade long of being a Mom.  Leighton Layne you gave me this role and changed my life in that moment.  Life could never be as sweet without you in it.  I love you!  Happy 10th birthday!

Hollyn Lee is ONE!

The sweetest little final piece to our family puzzle is ONE.  It's been fast (and chaotic) but it has been so so joyful.  We love you Hollyn Lee.  You make everyone in our family just a little bit better!

Our surprise gender reveal!

Knowing baby number four was our very last baby (no for REAL this time) we decided not to find out the gender.  We made it past the 10 week genetic screening and opted out of finding out and resisted the temptation to ask the tech at our high level anatomy scan at 20 weeks.  We thought we were in the clear for our big surprise, although I have to mention it was killing us not to know :)

A few weeks after our anatomy scan I was sitting in the kitchen early one morning checking my email.  I had an alert from my online records portal that a new test result had been added.  I quickly opened it without thinking twice and as I read the results I was SHOCKED to see the gender clearly listed.  SHOCKED.  I didn't know what to do so I ran upstairs where Toby was still sleeping and immediately woke him up.  I told him what happened and said I HAVE TO TELL YOU.  And without missing a beat i just blurted it out.  And then I cried for at least a week over our spoiled surprise. 

I would cry every single time I thought about not getting my delivery room surprise I wanted SO bad.  After listening to me for days Toby finally said something had to give.  I think I was driving him nuts.  We were so very thankful for this healthy baby and needed to share it.  We hadn't told anyone that we knew yet so we decided to have everyone over for our weekly family dinner and surprise THEM with our gender surprise.

Here's the reveal...

It's A ... from Mandy Daniel on Vimeo.

And for the record, all three kids were right!  On December 17, 2017 we welcomed our perfectly, perfect little Hollyn Lee.  Life is sweet.

Happy 6th Birthday Gracen!

Happy Birthday to our Gracen Rebecca.  Our sweet, sassy, sensitive girl who makes our family so special.  I love your zest for life and how you keep us all on our toes with your millions and millions of questions (even when we have to consult google for the answers).  The best maze and puzzle solver around!  We are SO glad you are ours!  We love you Gracie girl!

Happy 8th Birthday Leighton

We love you more than you know sweet girl!