As a record Arctic blast gripped Dallas and temperatures lingered in the teens, Ashtin Torrez went into labor on Jan. 28 in a city slowed by ice, shuttered schools and widespread power outages.
She delivered a daughter she named Alaska — a choice she had made more than a year earlier, while pregnant with her son, Elias, who she would lose at 35 weeks’ gestation. When she became pregnant again and learned she was carrying a girl, she kept the name. That Alaska arrived during one of the coldest stretches in recent memory felt to Torrez less like coincidence than something closer to providence.
“I feel like God is always sending signs,” Torrez, 32, tells TODAY.com…