Leah Rain - our new lady

Wow - it's been almost two weeks since Leah came to us.  Time flies when you're having fun:)  She is beautiful and calm and her brothers and sister can't get enough of her.  We are smitten - all of us.  I have so much I want to share about this little lady.  So much I want you to know Leah about how you came to us.  But first, a picture;

She's cute huh?  I might not get to her actual birth story today, but there is a pre-birth story here that I really want written down.  So, here goes;  Last spring, life was start to feel pretty good again.  Graham was finally sleeping.  Thinking about those first four months of his life kind of makes me cringe (i'm sorry baby!  You were just hard!).  I was feeling almost normal again too - I think it was all the stress and months of not sleeping that contributed to me being sick so much - but it was just a hard hard winter.  And before that, Grahams pregnancy had been so hard.  I was sicker than I had ever been with a pregnancy and once I started feeling better I had all these weird neck issues that left me with horrible headaches and flat on my back a lot of days.  I cried - a lot.  For a year.  But by last spring, things felt so good.

This was Easter 2012 (an important weekend for Leah). Don't we look calm and happy;) well we were!  But it was during this weekend that I talked with Joanna about when we would have another baby.  In my head I was thinking - holy cow - not for a long long time.  But thought, hey I ought to at least pray about that sometime.  In my head I figured that Heavenly Father knew how much we needed a little baby break.  Life was good - things were manageable - lets call it quits for a minute.  But - that's not the answer I got.  I felt - really strong - that we should have another baby.  soon.  Man - I was scared.  And so I didn't even talk to Brandon about it for a while.  But when you ignore stuff like that - life just kind of stinks.  Nothing seemed or felt right and I knew I couldn't ask for guidance and then just ignore it. So we talked (Brandon remembers it being with we were in Holland) and decided okay - we can do this.  I wasn't back to normal yet from having Graham but as soon as I was - I found out I was pregnant.  I kind of thought that if we were just obedient to this prompting - and didn't stop a baby from coming - that that would be enough and we would be "blessed" with a few more months.  Well, we were definitely blessed, but blessed to find out a baby was coming right away.  Okay - Graham has had about enough blogging for today...Leah's story... to be continued....