Hope in the Hopoate Family

 I’m sitting here holding my beautiful newborn, Aranui. I was just overwhelmed with gratitude because this time last year, I didn’t know when she’d come. We’d been wanting to get pregnant for a while with no luck. Oh how badly I wanted her. In so grateful she’s here.  We went on a family walk and we started talking about this year and next year and I realized that because of a rough pregnancy, 2023 was one of my hardest years of my life. I was taking care of 3 children, ages 5, 4 and 2. And was battling morning sickness every single day. I also had sciatica pain and round ligament pain. It was so hard.  I had exclaimed how grateful I am to end this year and move ahead. Which I still am. But in this moment… just a few days after our Māori Nana Marara has gone to the other side of the veil… I thank my God for the rough year!! It brought us sweet Aranui Mere!  2024 will be hard and great as well. And I hope it is. Hard things bring growth and happiness.  Here’s to ...

 My sweet Tiana is about to turn 6! I can hardly believe it. She’s been a light in my life since the moment she was born. I prayed for her with all my energy and she’s more than I could ever imagine.  As her birthday approaches my heart aches. Not for the little baby or the toddler, but for the future. I want nothing more than to watch her continue to grow. I want to see it all. I am so grateful to be here for this amazing day. But the ache is real for the hope I have to watch her continue to grow. I know I am not guaranteed a single moment on this earth. I don’t know when God will call me home. I have a constant prayer in my heart that I’ll be able to watch all my kids grow up. I want to see them get married. I want so badly to be here to help them with their kids. But I have very little control over that. So today, while I contemplate the amazing privilege and blessing it’s been to be here for 6 years of Tiana’s life, I am overwhelmed with gratitude. To be a mother in gener...

 Have you ever heard the saying, "It's neither good nor bad, it is yet to be seen." My husband told me a Chinese parable where this was the theme. My recent job endeavors have been like this. Flashback to 2019. I was pregnant with my second child and a stay at home mom with my daughter. I was currently working a super part-time job that was so perfect. It was only on Fridays. My husband would make that his one admin day where he would work from home. So he'd be home with our oldest and I could go to work. It was at a family practice office. I loved it. I worked with great people and it was so nice to get out of the house. I definitely missed my daughter while I was gone, but it was nice for me. The doctors and staff appreciated me because nobody wanted to work on Fridays lol, except for me. So while everyone was burnt out from the week, I wasn't and came in ready to work.  So I've got this awesome 'mom' set up. I have my baby and think it'll all s...

 My sweet Tiana’s birthday is coming up! She’s gonna be 6! I can hardly believe it.  So story time.  Tiana has liked ballet for the past year. So we finally signed her up for ballet and she’s been enjoying it! She has one more month in it and then she’s gonna try something new.  Well for her birthday, my dearest friend wanted to take Tiana to see real ballet, the Nutcracker in Salt Lake! I’ll be honest that I was really sad at first. I wanted to go and have that experience with Tiana. Why didn’t I think to do that? Could I just tag along because I don’t want to miss this! Or maybe I just take her myself?  All of these thoughts came because my amazing friend, who is practically my sister, wanted to do this for her niece.  I actually cried about it haha. Then turned to my husband. We chatted all about it. The pros and cons. He answered a lot of my thoughts. Some conclusions we got to were that I can’t go because it’s too long and I’d need to feed baby. It’s a...

            Heyo!! I want to share some tips from my motherhood journey about breastfeeding and newborn sleeping. I am no expert at all. I get the majority of my advice from a book called BABY WISE. And I highly recommend it to all those pregnant women who really want a healthy sleeping relationship for their baby. Otherwise, some of these tips will just come from my personal experience with 4 babies. Again, no expert here. Don't come for me haha. Just tips that have worked for me lol. First off want to start and say that the first 2 weeks of life are the most important. It can be thought that you don't have to create a routine right when a baby is born and to just do whatever works. However, I believe it to be so crucial to start some habits right away. I believe that a baby learns what to expect from outside of the womb within those first 2 weeks. If they are being held the whole time in those 2 weeks, they will think that is normal. They will reques...

 We welcomed our 4th baby into our family just over a week ago! We were so excited for her arrival, but also nervous... Nervous because we still had not decided on her name. This was my experience on coming to her name.      Malachi and I had already known one part of her name. We knew we wanted her to carry the name Marie/Mary. Marie is my middle name after my great grandma, Dorothy Marie Kelsey Gerber. Then we had many experiences that told us that Mary should be apart of her name when we were at the temple. So we translated it into a different language. We loved Marie/Mary in Maori, which is Mere. But we didn't really know if it was better as her first name or middle name.     Now this sweet little girl is born! She is just absolutely teeny tiny! She weighed 6lbs 9oz at birth making her our smaller baby by over a pound. She also looked super Maori to us when she was first born so that helped us focus on just Maori names.     Well the next 24 hr...

 Well here we are! I didn't think this day would come haha. I am down to my last couple of days being pregnant because we have an induction planned if she doesn't come soon. That made me want to go back a bit and talk about how this all started. It's a crazy and long story so here goes... May 2022 I am innocently sitting in sacrament meeting trying to entertain 3 kids who are ages 4, 3, and 1. It's quite a lot of work as you can imagine. No matter how many quiet toys and quiet snacks I bring, it's always pretty loud and hectic. Well on this particular Sunday a High Councilman is speaking and he's one of my friends. He's sharing about how every time he asks his son to do something, he will do it, but he'll first say, "yes, in one minute." Like he'll say to his son, "Josh, take out the trash." And Josh will say, "Yes, in one minute!" So he asked us to think about when we might be saying that same thing, "yes, in one m...