Hope in the Hopoate Family

      I am so grateful to be alive. Starting with that because today and this week have been so wonderful. Things have  been going like planned. My babies are healthy. I am healthy. I've gotten a lot done and spend great quality time with my family, but also had a lot of good breaks and me time.      However, a couple of weeks ago I was having a very low day. It was Sunday and my littles were having a hard day. It was really hard to stay at church and be reverent and feel good. Let's spell it out a little bit  more. My husband serves in the bishopric in our ward so I sit with 4 kids under the age of 6 by myself and try to keep them quiet, listening and holding still. Yeah, hard to do.       This was a special Sunday with a lot of our leaders speaking so I really wanted to listen, but my 2 year old was mad at everything I did or his siblings did. He did not want to play or eat or draw or anything lol. So needless to say, I ...

 So I was listening to this podcast over a year ago. It’s with Shawn Johnson and Andrew East about The Fatherless Epidemic. Here is the link to it… https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/couple-things-with-shawn-and-andrew/id1485740243?i=1000574913969 Well I just loved it! I highly recommend a quick listen of it. I’ll only mention one thing that impacted me recently! Alec Lace is the author and was the guest on the podcast talking about fatherhood. One thing he talked about was getting involved in what your kids like to do. He explained how with one of his kids it was easy. It was all the sports he personally loved and so he could easily join, coach, support and participate with his child. However, another child was really into chess. So he said he just started learning about it. That’s what good parents do. You get interested in what your kids get interested in. Super cool right. Well my kids are all still under the age of 5 and so they don’t really have individual interests yet… ...

A great family member gave me a Book of Mormon guidebook! She said she saw it and thought of me. She brought it over to me and I was so excited about it. It combines our church curriculum of Come Follow Me with some other activities to help you “slow down” while you read! Well I’m a handful of pages in and I appreciate this so much! It’s been a great addition to all my studies. Today it had this kind of goofy activity where as you read about Nephi and his brothers traveling all over, you drew a line to the new location. So you start in 1st Nephi chapter 3: 1-8 in the wilderness. Then walking back to Jerusalem. Then to Labans house, then Lehi’s house. Eventually to a cave, then the walls of the city, then Lehi’s treasury, etc… It super illustrates all the traveling they had to do. I thought it was kidish, but ended up loving what it taught me. After seeing these lines go everywhere, I realized how little Nephi’s parents knew what was going on. They saw the first and last lines… meaning ...

 My amazing husband got an amazing chance to go to New Zealand to lay to rest his wonderful grandmother. We prayed about it and knew he needed to go.  So I planned to stay home with our 4 kids. However, I don’t like being home alone, especially for how long he’d be gone. So I reached out to my awesome dad and he said we could stay with them while Malachi was gone! We worked out the logistics and we were all looking forward to some adventures! Starting with my dad driving from California to pick up me and my kids! Then letting us stay at his house, eat his food, make messes, give him headaches, haha and all the things that come with 5 new people in his house and 4 of those people being age 6 and under lol. Most credit goes to his wife for all she did for us! They are thoughtful people!  Okay so I had so much help from them! However, their dad was gone so I was solo on a lot of parenting duties like teaching, correcting, brushing teeth, changing diapers, etc… My dad and his...

 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...