Now that we’ve had some time to ponder about our time in Ireland. I’m going to do a series of stories about miracles that happened on our adventure in Ireland. We feel like our trip to Ireland was one big miracle made up of a bunch of small miracles. The first miracle I blogged about happened within hours of our arrival in Ireland. You can read it here.

This post is about one of the final miracles that happened in Ireland and I’ll fill in the rest later. I felt like it was a miracle to have little Quentin in Ireland. He has been our favorite and best souvenir. You can see his newborn pictures here.

We initially didn’t plan on having the baby in Ireland. We thought we would just fly home during my last month of pregnancy…. but Irish airlines wouldn’t let pregnant women fly internationally after 28 weeks. That was a problem. Dallin wasn’t finish with his research assignment in Ireland when I was 28 weeks pregnant so we decided to stay. We changed our airplane tickets to July 25 which is one month after the guess “birthday” of the new baby. We thought since my first baby was 2 weeks early that it wouldn’t be a problem to fly home on July 25. Well, things didn’t go as plan and the baby didn’t arrive until July 4th which is 9 days after my “due date”.

At first we didn’t realize how much paper work and processing time it was going to take to get the baby home to the USA:

• First we needed to get an Irish birth certificate (processing time 4 to 6 weeks)
• Then we needed to schedule an interview with the US embassy (booking 4 weeks in advance)
• We needed to take the Irish birth certificate to the US embassy interview to get a US birth certificate abroad and a US passport (processing time 6 weeks)
• Lastly, we had to wait for the passport to come in the mail

The total estimated time to get the baby’s passport was 10 weeks after birthday which would’ve put us to Sept 12th! We didn’t want to pay more money to change our flights and we really wanted to get back to Utah. So we prayed and I got a priesthood blessing. My husband and I both felt at peace that the Lord’s timing is always right.

We acted on faith after the baby finally arrived. We miraculous got an US embassy interview for July 11 (14 days before our flight date) but we still needed an Irish birth certificate. So we called and requested an emergency Irish birth certificate. The hospital faxed our information over to the government offices instead of waiting for the information to process in the system. We managed to get a copy of the baby’s Irish birth certificate on July 8th. We went to the interview and told the people at the US embassy that we want to fly on July 25 so they marked our application as “urgent” but they didn’t guarantee that it would happen by then. Our faith was indeed tested while we waited for the passport to arrive in the mail. I checked the mail everyday hoping that the passport have come.

I was in distress because we needed to change our flights at least 24 hours in advance! Well to make the story short, the passport arrived within 48 hours of our flight and we flew home on July 25th when our baby was shy of 3 weeks old.

Yep we made it home with a toddler and a newborn infant alive. How in the world did I just give birth and get on a plane to move our family across the ocean? I have no idea except that I felt the grace of God helping us every step of the way.

Well that’s it for now. We have many more miracles to post about!