Happy Halloween

We just wanted to say Happy Halloween! More pics to come.

Pumpkin Patch

Kashe got to go to a pumpkin patch with some of his cousins. He went on a hayride, picked a pumpkin out of the patch and went thru a cornmaze.

Kashe with his cousins.

Picking his pumpkin.

Hangin with Grandma DD (and checking out his pumpkin)!

More Pics @ 4 Months

Here are a few more pictures of Kashe at 4 months.

Cousin Liam let us borrow this fun toy and Kashe loves it. He also has to have his fists in his mouth at all times.

Thanks Chase man for my awesome shirt.
He acts surprised everytime the camera comes out.

Ben had to get some pictures with his hat on. How about those cheeks.

More time on the floor.

DUDE

When we were at the reunion my nephew Jed put a hat on his brother Liam and very seriously said, "There now you look like a DUDE." When I put this hat on Kashe I thought of Jed saying that.

We were getting ready to go for a walk and I had to cover up this poor babies white, BALD head so he wouldn't get burned. He was making the funniest faces so I had to take some pictures.

Reunion

Here are a few more pictures of the reunion. Notice all the red shirts!

Ben~Kashe~Josh~Liam

My SISTAS and Dad

Me and Jeddy playing at the Creek

We had so much fun just like we always do. I have so many great memories of our Putnam family reunion and I look forward to it every year.

Naked Babies

At our annual Putnam Family reunion it got pretty toasty so all these babies had their clothes off. We couldn't help but take some pictures.

Cousin Liam~Kashe~Cousin Jalie

This one is my favorite. Kashe makes that face everytime someone pulls out a camera. It is his super serious face. I guess he is going to be as photogenic as his mommy and daddy.

JUST A LITTLE SOMETHING TO PUT A SMILE ON YOUR FACE

Blessing Day

Ben was able to bless Kashe on July 25th. Cousin Jalie came to Evanston that day and was blessed by Nathan. Ben did a great job and it was a really special little blessing. I'm very grateful Ben is able to do these special things for our family. Kashe was a good boy and so many of his aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents were able to come. We had a BBQ at Grandma DD's after. (Thanks Grandma DD)

His Aunt Amber had a gal in her church make this blessing outfit for him. It was really cute and fit perfect.

A little smile from the boy! The blanket he is laying on is from Grandma Day.
Kashe with Mom and Dad
I thought this picture was cute of Great-Grandma and Grandpa trying to get Kashe to be good for his picture.

Pretty Aunt Ash and Kashe

Just Kashe

SNOOZING

GOING CROSS-EYED AT MOM

BABY BLUES

CHILLIN

Best Friends

Kashe has really started to be social and give us alot of smiles. His first real smile was July 9th. He wasn't quite a month old. He was in the car and his cousin McCaden was playing with him and he gave her a great big smile, you could tell he really knew what he was doing (he didn't just have gas)! He has the cutest smile. After that he would smile alot at us but he would save his best smiles for his

BEST FRIENDS .........

Mr. Fan

And

Number 1 Pal

For some reason he thinks these two are great fun. The fan is in the living room and I will lay him on the floor and the fan will entertain him for a long time. The #1 is a sign in his room right above his changing table. He smiles at his "number 1 pal" the entire time you change his diaper. I have to say, changing his bum is one of my favorite things to do because I can watch him smile the whole time.

Anyway below are the kiddos that will become his best friends. My sister Amber had a baby boy-Liam in March. He is on the right. My sister-in-law Brooke had a baby girl-Jalie a week before Kashe. It will be alot of fun to see these kids grow up together. It was interesting trying to take a picture with all three of them.

A week after Kashe was born my cousin Cortnee had a little girl-Elle. (You can see the hematoma that Kashe had on his head after he was born really well in this picture.)
Kashe also had a cousin born just last week. Ben's brother Derek and his wife Jess had another little boy-Dayton. We don't have a picture yet with him. We will have to wait until September. These five kids are going to have alot of fun.

Bath Time

Kashe LOVES bath time. He also loves to take a shower with his daddy. I guess he just loves water. I keep telling Ben that he is going to be a swimmer like his mommy but Ben doesn't love that. He can find alot more things he loves to do then sit at a swim meet. I guess we will just have to wait and see.

I love the picture on the bottom left. You can see how big his cheeks are getting and the second chin!

Kashe Three Weeks Old

We had a gal in Utah take some pictures of Kashe when he was three weeks old. He wanted to be awake the entire time so that made things kind of interesting but she got some cute pictures of him. Here are just a few of them. He is six weeks old today and I can't believe how different he is from these pictures. He has grown so much already. We don't know his official weight yet but we put him on the scale with Ben last week and he weighed 11 pounds! He is going to be a big boy!

OUR SPECIAL MIRACLE

Warning………this is a lengthy blog and may jump around a little. I wanted to write a little about the journey we took to get Kashe so that I wouldn’t forget. Read on if you would like but mostly it is just for my journal.

We had a hard time getting pregnant and we ended up having a lot of help to get Kashe. It isn’t something that we talked about a lot unless people had questions. Not because we were embarrassed or because it was too painful to talk about but more because we didn’t want the fact that we couldn’t have kids define who we were. We didn’t want to be the “poor sad couple who wanted babies and couldn’t have them.” Yes, we couldn’t have kids but we still had a lot of really great blessings in our lives and we wanted to focus on that. Tried to always focus on that.

It all started about six years ago when Ben and I decided that we wanted to start our family. It was our one year anniversary and we decided that we would start trying to have kids instead of preventing. It was going to work out perfect…….I had one more year of college. (Ben had promised my dad when he asked for my hand in marriage that I would get my degree and he wasn’t going to go back on that promise.) I would graduate in May and then we would have a baby that summer. We had it all worked out, or so we thought! So we got to work tryingJ and trying and trying! (This process wasn’t all bad I have to admit.) When we didn’t get pregnant the first couple months we thought that was kind of funny but didn’t think too much of it. After a year we started to worry a little bit. Then after a year and half we went to a doctor in Laramie. He ran a few tests but he didn’t think that anything was wrong. He wasn’t a specialist so he really didn’t know how to help us and frankly he didn’t really seem to care. We felt like we wasted time and money with this doctor. We decided to start seeing a specialist in Ft. Collins who we loved. He decided that I had endometriosis in a nutshell this meant that I had scarring in my ovaries and it caused really painful periods and could be the reason we could not get pregnant. He performed a surgery to clean up my ovaries and told us that we just needed to wait and see if that would work. At this point we had been trying for about three years. After this surgery some women get pregnant right away and some still don’t at all. We waited and continued to try and get pregnant but after another year nothing was happening.

At this point we also moved to Evanston so we had to get another doctor. We started seeing Dr. Blauer in Sandy Utah, we also loved this doctor and the clinic. We felt like these people cared about us and were really trying to help us get pregnant. We decided with Dr. Blauer that we needed to start being a little more proactive and we tried to do intrauterine insemination or IUI. For this process I started taking some pretty heavy duty hormones and then the doctors and nurses would do ultrasounds to try and predict when I was ovulating and then inject the sperm directly into me with the hope that the sperm would have a better chance of making it to the egg. We did this five times but we STILL were not having any luck. All of these procedures are pretty expensive and we finally decided that we needed to stop paying for this procedure and move on the next step…….basically the final step, IVF. If IVF didn’t work then nothing would. For this procedure I had to take a lot of hormones. Ben would inject them into my stomach and back depending on the medication. He became a great nurse. We did the shots and then the doctor takes the eggs from me. They inject the sperm directly into the egg and wait to see if they fertilize. If they fertilize they become embryos and the doctor will inject them directly into the patient. The first time we did IVF we had Fair to minus embryos which isn’t great. Dr. Blauer implanted two. We had to wait two weeks before we would know if I was pregnant. After two weeks the nurse called and said that my pregnancy test was negative!! This was definitely the hardest time in the whole process. Ben and I were sure that this would work and it was really hard when it didn’t. Especially because we knew that this was our last shot, there was nothing else to try.

I was pretty devastated when the first IFV didn’t work and I wasn’t really interested in trying again. The last thing I wanted was to go through all the medication and procedures and pain and then have a nurse call and tell me that it didn’t work! Luckily, Ben felt like we should do it again and so we did! We went through the entire process again. This time we implanted three embryos. This time when the nurse called the test was positive.

After all of this…….the entire six year journey. After all the doctors’ appointments, the shots, the pain, the money, the emotional rollercoaster I can honestly say………

It was

Totally.................................

Completely..........................

100%..................................