IN THE BEGINNING
How we met
We count the first time we met as the time when we went to the Draper Temple together with a a mutual friend in July of 2011. My friend and I had planned the time to go and invited about 20 friends to join us - that night, it ended up being Kyle and 4 girls. He had actually almost missed it but had a feeling he needed to go that night.
We chatted the whole evening and when I asked if anyone wanted to stop at Chili's on the way home to get dessert, Kyle immediately agreed and paid for dessert for the whole group. (And he's been buying me chocolate cake ever since… 😉😂)
He felt like it was awkward to single me out to get my number, so after he got home, he texted our mutual friend and asked for it. He texted me that night and asked if we could talk on the phone the next day.
Kyle and I talked for over an hour on that first phone call and he asked me if I wanted to go on a date - I said yes, that would be great! He told me he'd call me back soon with the details. When Kyle called back a couple days later, he said we were going to go play glow in the dark tennis. And I'd never played tennis before in my life. I was like, "oh great…" 🤦😂. I really didn't want to make a fool of myself!
The night of the date came and Kyle picked me up at my house. I remember that my dad answered the door with my 15 year old brother standing nearby (my sweet brother said he wanted to check Kyle out to make sure he wasn't a crazy person before we left. Haha)
We went to Kyle's friend's house (who we were going on a double date with) and ate pizza and chocolate/caramel covered apples that Kyle brought from his work - he was working as a driver for Edible Arrangements where they make beautiful and delicious chocolate covered fruit bouquets. Kyle learned quickly that dessert is the way to my heart, haha!
Our first date was great! Kyle was patient and kind as he taught me to play tennis (which is also much harder in the dark in case you were wondering. 😉😂). After he dropped me off at home, I texted him and told him I had a great time and thanked him for taking me. After that night, we never went a single day without talking to each other - and it's been 9 years! When Kyle got home from our first date, his mom was waiting for him and asked how it went. He told her right then that he could marry me. After 2 weeks of dating, my mom asked me if I could marry Kyle and I told her yes. I know it definitely doesn't always work this way, but we both knew right from the beginning that we could spend forever together.
We saw each other for the next 30 days straight. We packed several months worth of dating in just a few weeks before I moved back to Provo to go to BYU again. Kyle helped move me in and I just cried. I LOVED BYU and had been so excited to go back until I met Kyle - he was going to the University of Utah and I didn't want to leave him.
I stayed at BYU for the next 3 months and Kyle and I talked on the phone every day and visited each other on the weekends. Finally in November, we both just couldn't take the distance anymore. I got a job in Salt Lake that started in January and I just decided moved home one weekend! I took the bus to and from Provo every day from Salt Lake so Kyle and I could be together more often. In January I was able to rearrange my schedule to only have classes twice a week which was nice.
Then we got married!
In December 2011, on Christmas Day, Kyle and I got engaged! We were so happy and set our wedding date for May 21, 2012 - *exactly* 10 months from our first date. Being engaged and planning a wedding was stressful and we talked constantly of just eloping. 😂 But we had a beautiful wedding and the day was wonderful. We were glad we waited so we could share that special day with our friends and family.
After going over every possible option to figure out how we could make both of us going to school work, I decided to transfer to the University of Utah. Splitting the distance was too hard, I had a great job in Salt Lake and by transferring, I could cut a whole year off my degree (and Kyle would add more than a full year to his degree and lose his scholarship if he transferred to BYU, so it only made sense). I transferred schools and we started together at the University of Utah. I had a hard time with the adjustment - I loved everything at BYU but being with Kyle was worth it! I loved driving to campus together and finishing up all of our generals together (and also skipping our Tuesday sociology class together to go get pizza. 🤣)
We had been married only 6 months and both in our junior year of college when we found out I was expecting our first baby. We were both terrified and excited. She was due in July and we both decided to do a summer semester of college so that we could get our degrees out of the way and focus on being parents.
I got a lot of looks and a lot of questions about my growing belly while we were in school. But the time passed quickly and our daughter Ambree was born on a Friday at the end of July. And finals week started on Monday. It was a crazy time!
After summer finals were over, we had 2 weeks off of school before we both started our senior year. We spent every second we could with our daughter and made plans for our parents to watch her while we both went to classes and then I could be home with her for the majority of the time Kyle was at work late into the nights. We somehow (completely miraculously) survived our senior year of college and both graduated on the same day when Ambree was 9 months old. It was a special day for our family and we were so happy to finally be done with school! Luckily just in time for Ambree to start crawling and getting into everything a week later! 😂
LIFE AFTER GRADUATION
After graduation, I was so happy to be able to stay home with Ambree full time. A few months later, I found out I was pregnant with our second baby and Kyle got a job working for Enterprise -- his dream job. He graduated from their Management Training Program with flying colors but realized along the way that he actually didn’t like this job at all. He hated the hours (and a few other things…) and started teaching himself (along with some tutoring from my dad) how to write code to be a software engineer. Our son, Benson was born in May and a month later, Kyle quit his job to learn how to program full time. He was unemployed for a few months and spent 8+ hours a day learning all he could. In September, he got his first programming job and he loves it - especially the schedule, because he gets to be with our family so much more! Life was a little disrupted when we found out that our son was born with a congenital heart defect. He was monitored closely until he had heart surgery to fix the problem when he was 9 months old. It was a terrifying time for us, but we saw so many miracles.
And then there were 5...
Just one week after Benson’s surgery, I found out I was pregnant with our 3rd baby -- our daughter, Caroline, who goes by Callie. We now had 3 kids in 3 years and those first couple years were busy, sleepless, and a little crazy but SO wonderful and fun. We have so many happy memories from those years!
HOW WE CAME TO ADOPTION
Our grief and healing
When Callie was 9 months old, we wanted to try to have another baby. We thought we’d have one more child biologically and then in a few years, we’d be in a place in life where we could adopt. But I had a rough birth/recovery with Callie and after talking with my doctor, we found out it could be dangerous or impossible for me to get pregnant again. To say I was devastated is an understatement. Having the ability to have children ripped away from us with no warning was heartbreaking. I also carried SO much guilt - we had 3 children, why couldn’t I feel at peace with that? I know so many amazing couples who struggle with infertility and don’t have any children. I felt so guilty for wanting another child when I have friends and family struggling with childlessness. But I felt deep in my soul that someone was missing from our family.
We prayed to know what to do, and I felt like adoption was the answer but that we also needed to go see a fertility specialist. We began seriously researching adoption and learning all we could and seeing a fertility doctor. I was diagnosed with unexplained infertility -- everything my doctor had thought that I had wasn’t there and there was no explanation why I wasn’t getting pregnant. We called adoption agencies and consultants and attended a birth parent panel. We also went through a full year of fertility treatments with zero progress. I felt so confused and hurt -- why did God tell me to go to the fertility center if nothing was working?! We reached a point where our doctor told us that there was nothing else that they could do for us. By that time, I realized why I had felt so strongly that I needed to go to the fertility center - I needed to grieve and heal. I didn’t actually lose a baby, but I still had a massive loss and hole that I needed to work through. Going through that process at the fertility center really helped me work through my loss and heal in a way that I could walk away from ever being pregnant again. Through a lot of prayer, we still felt like there was a child meant to be in our family.
