Pregnancy, Stillbirth, and Infant loss awareness day

10.15.14

October 15th is pregnancy and infant loss awareness day. I didn't even know about this day last year, but had several of my friends participate in the Wave of Light in Kaitlyn's honor. The Wave of Light is where you light a candle from 7-8pm in your time zone so that the light travels the entire globe in memory of the babies lost. This year, Hope Mommies requested that Elyse and I organize a balloon release for the local area Hope Moms to come to in addition to the Wave of Light. We were excited to do so, and we had a pretty good turn out of moms in the area show up.

I filled in some of the extra balloons with names of my friends' babies.

The whole Hope Mommies group. My only sad thought of this picture is that the fabulous Mallie Ray took it- which is only sad because she should have been in it with us. 

     It was neat to see this group come together just because we all have different stories. Some of us only know each other through the Hope Mommies group, others have shared Mallie as a Now I lay Me Down to Sleep photographer, and still others have known each other through the Hope Mommies Bible study that Elyse and Michelle have both lead.

    After the release, we all went down the street to a BBQ place to have a nice dinner and light our candles for the Wave of Light. Elyse had a friend that took the time to write all of our baby's names on the votives that held the candles.

Hope Mommies Candle

I left a candle for Alex at the house. I wasn't sure if he would use it or not, but he sent me a picture 

of this candle lit during the 7-8pm hour.

Me and Elyse, both about 36 weeks pregnant.

The next weeks

10.6.14-10.15.14

      The weekend seemed to creep by: I was trying my best not to worry or overdo it, but I found myself doing constant kick counts and counting down to the time when I would get to go to the doctor to see our little girl on the ultrasound screen.

       Monday finally rolled around and we went in to the office to talk to Dr. B about "the plan". She still wanted us to try to wait until 38 weeks to deliver, which I was less than thrilled about. We decided to switch to biweekly checks, meaning that I would continue having full biophysical profiles including sonograms and an NST, and we added an extra NST each week. It definitely seemed to help my anxiety, and I continued taking the medicine every 6 hours, even setting an alarm on my phone every night for 2 AM to be sure I didn't miss a dose. I was a nervous wreck, and again the only thing I kept referring to were my notecards filled with scriptures.
        Each time I went into have an NST, the story would be the same. Maybe a weak contraction or two, but nothing regular and nothing severe. Baby girl's heart rate was tolerating everything just fine, so we kept waiting, each day inching closer to our goal.

         On the afternoon of the 15th, I had one of my usual biophysical profile appointments complete with a sonogram and some time with Dr. B. My next appointment wasn't until the following Monday, and I expressed to her that it made me a little uncomfortable to go that long without being checked out.
         "I know everything is looking good, but it just feels like that is a really long time without having eyes on her at all. Would you be okay with me coming in for an NST on Friday?" I asked her in the exam room.
          "If that's what you need, that's totally fine. I'm actually off on Friday, but I can see if one of my partners minds reading your test," she replied. "I'll let you know in just a minute who that will be."
           After I gathered my things and opened the door to leave, Dr B let me know that her partner, Dr D, would be available to read my test on Friday. I was pretty relieved that I would be able to come back in without any hiccups.

            The other thing that happened that morning was that my grandmother, who had been struggling with Alzheimers disease and congestive heart failure, had slipped out of her chair in the middle of the night (sleeping sitting straight up was the only way she was able to rest) and broke her hip. It was really hard on my Dad because her Alzheimers had gotten so bad that it would have done more harm than good to put her through a surgery to fix her hip. So instead, the doctors just did their best to make her comfortable. It was only a matter of time before she would leave us to go be with her husband and her Maker in Heaven.

        

Discharge

10.03.14

       The next morning was another surprise visitor. One of my favorite nurses that I am so thankful for, Gail, came in to see us. She was just coming on shift and immediately took charge of my care (which makes me laugh even now!), writing her name on the board to replace the night nurse's name. She also gave me her cell phone number and told us that if something happened between now and Halloween (when we were scheduled and all of our previous nurses had scheduled themselves to work to be with us), to text or call her and let her know so she could swing by.
        About 9 in the morning, Dr B came in and looked at the strips from overnight. They had started a medication at 10 pm that was to be taken every 8 hours, so she had a good chunk of time to see if the medication had worked to stop the contractions. Luckily, it had.
        "So we'll go ahead and discharge you on this medication and I'll see you in the office on Monday," she told me as she picked up the long stretch of paper that had been printing off our contractions and heart rates over night.
         Fear.
         "If something happens over the weekend..." I said quietly.
         "Don't hesitate. Come back in to L&D and we will hook you back up again."
         "That scares me. I mean, you have plenty of time there where the contractions weren't affecting her heart rate? There's no reason for you to keep me longer?" I almost begged. I didn't want to go home and be responsible for deciding when it was "emergent" enough to come back to the hospital.
          "Well, we can't monitor you like this indefinitely," she said gently. "This medication is really effective, and you'll be on it every 8 hours but if you start having breakthrough contractions at the 6-7 hour mark then you can move it up to every 6 hours."
           "I'll just take it ever 6 hours then, I really don't want to mess around with this," I told her hesitantly.
           "That's no problem. You'll probably still have a contraction every now and then, but nothing this regular for a long period of time. Our goal is still to get you to 38 weeks before we deliver."
            Ugh. Four more weeks of this. I wasn't ready.
 
             The rest of the day I pretty much tried to recover from the excitement of the hospital. Mom and Dad decided that they weren't needed and left to go to Austin, and Alex headed to work that afternoon to not miss too much of it.
             And I went back to my notecards. Reminding myself every time I got scared that I wasn't in control, the baby's days were already written, and that our God is good.

One night with The King

10.02.14

      After a couple of hours of talking to different familiar faces and letting the nurses watch my contractions, it was decided that they needed to start me on a medication to make the contractions stop (hopefully). Alex settled in for a night on the couch next to me, and I tried to get comfortable in the hospital bed without moving the monitors too much.
      The nurses had kind of "taught" me to read the monitors so that I was educated on what all was going on. Constantly in the background, the baby's steady heart beat was thumping along at around 150. When I would start to feel a contraction, I could look up at the monitor and see the climbing hill and peak of when the contraction maxed out followed by the slow decent back down to the baseline all while listening to the baby's heart rate. It was incredibly reassuring and scary at the same time because there were points where the baby's heart rate would drop down into the 120s. Not that 120 is scary, but any kind of rapid heart rate change made my pulse go up just because the slowing of the steady sound of 150 had become so familiar.
      Once the decision had been made to move me to a room and keep me overnight, I called my parents to check in with them. They had decided to drive up from West Texas and be with us while I was in this premature labor, something that really made me uncomfortable because I felt that they were only coming because they were worried that we would deliver that night. Also, since my grandmother had been going downhill with her Alzheimer's disease, that week had been particularly rough on my parents with figuring out how to best care for her without wearing themselves down completely. It was my Dad who tried to comfort me a little on the issue.
      "We just feel like we need to be there; we're not panicked or in a hurry, we just want to be there..." he said in his calm-but-tired voice.
      "Yeah but what are you guys going to do when you get here? You're just going to sit up here and stare at me and there's really no use in that," I told him.
      "Well that's okay, we just want to be there in case you need us."
      "Dad, there isn't anything anyone can do right now. Alex can't do anything, y'all can't do anything, even I can't do anything. This is all up to God and if tonight is when we're suppose to deliver her then that's what's going to happen. This is just between me and God right now, and having everyone else's anxiety around me isn't going to help me calm down to try to help these contractions stop."
       His end of the line was quiet for a minute.
       "Okay. You're right. We are already on our way, but if you decide you don't need us this weekend we'll head on to Austin since we were headed there anyways. We just want to be close incase our granddaughter comes tonight."
        "That's fair. I just don't want y'all to come up here and be worried around me," I reaffirmed.
   
         I really wasn't trying to be a jerk, but it just felt overwhelming to have everyone rush in from out of town. First off, I didn't want my parents making the 5 hour drive in the middle of the night. My parents aren't old by any stretch of the imagination (number wise or acting wise), but in the back of my head that fear that I had been battling all week took a different turn. "What if your parents are killed on the highway? They would be on their way up here to be with you and if nothing even happens then they died for nothing. Your daughter wouldn't know her grandparents because you scared them into coming."
         I had to start my verse-battles again. I started repeating the verses I had written on the back of those notecards that had lived in my purse for a week.

         Eventually, our room quieted down. We turned off the TV and Alex fell asleep on the couch. Every few hours, the nurses would come in and ask me to roll over or shift my hips a little bit because the baby's heart rate didn't like the position I was in. After one of these episodes, I couldn't go back to sleep so I just laid there and stared at the ceiling.

          Thub thub thub thub thub thub thub Baby girl's heart rate at 150.
          Thub      thub     thub     thub      thub Baby girl's heart rate at 120.
          Contractions come, contractions go.
          Repeat.
          Thub thub thub thub thub thub thub.
          A girl could go crazy focusing on those heart beats.

          Thub     thub      thub     thub      thub
          Leave it to us to make another stubborn child that is making her own schedule.

          Thub thub thub thub thub thub thub
          Contraction starting
          Thub       thub      thub     thub      thub
          I wonder if this is what happened to Kaitlyn.

         I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised. After all, the devil loves doubt and worry because it makes us question our Maker, but still the thought shocked me. When I had felt the wave of movement in the office I had been reminded of that same feeling I had towards the end of my pregnancy with Kaitlyn. I had always thought it was her shoulder or her arm making a movement across my stomach to get more comfortable, but now I know that it was really contractions and I just didn't realize it.
        If this baby girl was having a hard time tolerating my contractions, why wouldn't Kaitlyn? This baby was head down and had been for a while, but if a baby is breech does it make it harder for them to tolerate labor? Her head was right under my rib cage and who knows where her cord was.
        Did I have contractions before I felt her stop moving?
        After a year of grief, it's hard to remember.
        I laid there and stared at the ceiling and cried. I cried for my daughter that was gone. I cried for my daughter that was still here. The fear had taken a stronghold on me and it was hard for me to shake it in the dark room of the hospital.

        And then something popped into my head- a conversation I had with Kate when I was seeing her again before Kaitlyn's birthday.
        We had talked about fear and doubt, and she reminded me that every one of Kaitlyn's days were written long before I got pregnant with her. Every second of her life, every kick, turn, head butt, everything; was written in God's book before she was even a thought in our heads.
         And the same went for this baby.
        There was nothing I could do that would change the course of this baby's life because God had already written her story.

"Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written,

every one of them,

the days that were formed for me,

when as yet there were none of them."

Psalm 139:16

          Such freedom. Such peace from the promises of God.
          I breathed a little easier after that. The anxiety was still there, but it was now background music instead of concert-loud in the front of my mind.
          All I needed to do was cling to Jesus and the promise that there was nothing going on in my body that He didn't already know about.
           Peace.

Week 34

10.02.14

     On Thursday I had another appointment with Dr. B. We had switched to weekly visits at 32 weeks along and every visit now consisted of a full biophysical profile. What this means is that I got a sonogram and a non-stress test every time I went in to see her.
      This day wasn't anything out of the ordinary: sonogram first and everything went great, then the non-stress test. The MA had asked before if I would mind doing the NST first since it takes 20 minutes, but I had to tell her I couldn't do that because I would have a panic attack if I thought it took her too long to find the baby's heart beat. She had been super sweet and understanding, even apologizing for not thinking that it could be more stressful to go in that order.
       This time, as I was hooked up to the sensors for the NST and surfing the internet on the phone, a wave of movement crossed over my stomach. It felt like a huge roll, like the baby had decided to literally cross my entire abdomen to get more comfortable.
        On the NST machine there are two numbers: one that reads out the baby's heart rate and the other reads out the percentage of contractility, or how strong a muscle contraction is. The second number got up to 96% when that wave went across my stomach, but since I could see the baby's heart rate I never really worried about it.
         A few minutes later, the MA came back to check on me.
         "I'm just going to run this strip over to Dr. B to see what she thinks..." she said.
         "Yeah something ferocious happened a few minutes ago!" I laughed.

         After a wait, the MA came back again to get me to go see the doctor.
         "Your husband's not with you today?" she said as we walked down the hallway. It was really my first indicator that something was up.
          I sat in the exam room waiting on Dr. B to come in and started feeling anxious. I didn't know what was going on, but I knew whatever they saw on the monitor wasn't what they were expecting.
          Finally, Dr B came in and sat down on the rolling stool that is in all the exam rooms.
          "So, you're having contractions. Have you been feeling these?" she asked.
          "Is that what that was? I just thought it was the baby doing a big roll or something," I said, rather shocked.
          "Yeah, they're contractions," she paused. "What I see on this strip isn't awful, but I think I want to watch you a little closer. So if it's okay, I'm going to have you go ahead and head over to Labor and Delivery and they'll be expecting you. They'll hook you up and we'll just watch this a little longer."
           "Oh it's that serious?" I asked, definitely shocked now.
           "Well they are pretty regular and on the one that you felt the baby's heart rate fluctuated just a little bit, and with your history I don't want to mess around so I would just feel better if we watch you for the next couple of hours. Two, at a minimum. It could be an overnight stay, depending on what we see. And if I say this out loud it won't happen, but there is a possibility that I would need to deliver you tonight."
           "Okay," I agreed. Their office is attached to the hospital and there is a pedestrian bridge that connects the two. It had started raining pretty badly outside, and as I walked along the corridor I called Alex to tell him what was going on.
           "Do I need to come over?" he asked.
            I stopped walking and thought for a moment. I knew that I was just going to go over to the pre-op area of L&D and sit on the monitor for two hours. Honestly, I didn't feel anxious at all. I had been reciting my verses in my head all week and I knew that if this what how our delivery was suppose to go then it would be okay.
            "No," I shook my head as I said it. "You're just down the street, 5 minutes away. I'll call you if I need you. Just be sure to keep your phone where you can get to it if I need you."
             The next call was to my mom, and it went a little differently than my conversation with Alex.
             "We need to come up there," she said, which it was a 5 hour drive from where they were to Dallas.
             "No, we don't know anything yet, Mom," I said. "If something happens then, yeah, you can come up."
             "Well... Okay," she said reluctantly.
              I wasn't trying to play the hero, but my parents had had a rough week because my Dad's mom had really started going downhill with her Alzheimers. She had also developed congestive heart failure and I knew that my Mom had spent the majority of her week trying to help my Dad with caring for my grandmother. In my heart, I didn't think we would be delivering that night and I didn't really want my parents driving in the middle of the night to come all the way up here for nothing.
           
              I asked when I got to the check-in desk if one of the nurses who had been with us with Kaitlyn named Nell was around. They told me that she had just scrubbed in on a c-section, but they would let her know that I was there when the procedure was over. The nurse who hooked me up had already been updated as far as our history with Kaitlyn, and she told me that she remembered the day we came in. It was a strange sensation, having someone tell you that they remember you even though you'd never met.
              One of my coworkers was downstairs and I had texted her earlier to let her know that I might not be coming in to work tomorrow if I was admitted to the hospital. She had decided to pop up for a minute and check on me, and then she graciously went to get me some "smut" magazines to pass the time (you know, the celebrity gossip magazines that speculate about who's getting divorced and who has a love child with so-and-so). Kristy was a little excited that we could be welcoming our little one, and it was at that point that I let it slip.
               "I don't have my hospital bag packed..." I said. "I don't even have an outfit for her. I'm terrible!"
                With that, Kristy pounced.
                "Its a girl!?" she said, excited.
                "Haha, yes it is!" I said. "Don't tell anyone because we really don't need anything, but yes it's another girl!"

                After about an hour, Dr B came in. Kristy was still there chatting with me because we like to talk and hadn't seen each other in a while.
                Dr B pursed her lips a little as she looked at the strips. "Well, you're still having contractions," she said.
                 "Well, if I get to have a vote, I say please keep me overnight if you have any hesitation at all about what is going on," I said. "Otherwise I will just go home and worry about how her heart rate is doing."
                "Done. You'll stay tonight and we'll see if we can't get these to stop. We're going to start a bag of fluid to see if maybe you're just dehydrated," she said. "They will get you moved into another room that has a couch for Alex to sleep on."
               
                 Kristy asked me if I wanted her to stay around until Alex got there, but I honestly still felt fine. I knew they were watching the contractions and doing everything they could to stop them.
                 Slowly, it started to get out that I was there. One of the first people in was Nell, fresh off a c-section in the back hallway of labor and delivery. She was shocked that I was there, but happy I had let her know to come see me. She asked all about how Alex was doing and how he had handled our second pregnancy. It was nothing but compassion and love.
                 Next came Morgan, the nurse who was in training with Gail when we first checked in with Kaitlyn. I had thought about Morgan a lot because I knew that we would have changed her course as a nurse because she saw one of the absolute worst case scenarios very early in her training. She was thrilled to see us, and wanted me to be sure to let her know when Alex got there. She excitedly told us that she had switched to the night shift and that she was loving it.
                 With Morgan came Robin, one of the nurses who had helped lead the grief group at the hospital. Eventually Carol came in, the CRNA who had done my epidural with Kaitlyn. She hurriedly wrote down her personal cell phone number on a paper towel so that I could text her directly if something were to happen and we needed to deliver. She told me that if she wasn't on call she would still come in and do my procedure.
               
                  As all these visitors and familiar faces came in and out of the room, my phone had somehow decided to go on silent. It laid right next to my leg, but since it never vibrated I never felt that Alex had called me 8 times.
                 It still hurts me that I did this to him. Understandably, he lost it. He thought something had happened and I wasn't okay or our second baby girl wasn't okay. When I finally saw the missed calls and immediately called him back, he wasn't ready to talk or come in to the hospital yet. Once he gathered himself, he came into the room and I apologized for the hundredth time for doing that to him.
                "Everything is fine..." I said to him.
                "Then why are you here?" he asked abruptly.
                 It was at that point I got shaken out of my denial. Everything wasn't really okay or I would have been at home already. I would have been sent home after a few more minutes in the labor and delivery holding area, not staying overnight. Everything wasn't okay.
                 It was scary.
                 It was unknown.

Fear.

9.27.14-9.29.14

      That Saturday, we had a dinner party to celebrate our newest addition. We had invited all of our friends from the area: people from the hospitals I worked at, some local Hope Mommies, and some of our couple friends from church.

       It wasn't until Monday that it hit: fear. Almost crippling fear.
       Maybe I had focused so much on Kaitlyn's birthday and just getting through that important day that I didn't realize that I was scared to death of the birth that was looming ahead. Dr. B had recommended a second c-section because I had a vertical tear off of my incision from where she pulled Kaitlyn out, and we had scheduled it for Halloween morning. I had tried to make light of it, saying that I wanted to dress up for Halloween which would include me painting my stomach like a pumpkin. I even considered writing "cut here" across my scar to make the nurses laugh.
       But after we got through Kaitlyn's birthday, everything became real. That Sunday night, I had a near panic attack while I was sitting on the couch. The thing to do starting after about 28 weeks is to start monitoring the baby's movement by doing kick-counts. Basically, you sit very still and count how long it takes the baby to move 10 times and if it takes more than about 40 minutes you have reason for concern. Our little one was so active that I always tended to hit the 10 count mark at about 5 minutes. On a bad day, it was 10 minutes.
       Sunday night, after a long day where I had been preoccupied, it took 20 minutes. I panicked. Completely panicked. Was that a significant change? Enough to warrant a trip to the ER for a sonogram?? How was I suppose to know what to do?
        I panicked to Alex and he told me to breathe. We reviewed the different protocols for kick counts (one includes where you re-start the 40 minute timer to make sure it wasn't a fluke), and ultimately he told me to go take a bath and try to relax a little. Thankfully, when I got in the bathtub and relaxed our normal 5 minute kick count happened. I still had a hard time sleeping that night, even though I tried to reassure myself that everything was fine and that they baby's movement hadn't slowed down or stopped.

       During August, I had participated in a book study at church called Crash the Chatterbox by Steven Furtik. The book talked about spiritual warfare in the form of negative "chatter" heard in our heads. One of the exercises we did at the very beginning of the class was to take notecards and write lies on one side and Biblical truths on the other. My cards looked like this:
      Lie 1: What you are doing is worthless
      Truths 1: 1 Corinthians 9:24 "Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? Run so that you may obtain it."
                     Galatians 6:9 "And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap if we do not give up."

       Lie 2: You will never be good enough
       Truth 2: Luke 12:7 "Why, even the hairs of your head are numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows."

        Lie 3: This (loosing Kaitlyn) will happen again
        Truth 3: Hebrews 10:23 "Let's hold on to the confession of our hope without wavering, because the One who made the promises is reliable."

      That Monday when fear hit me, I decided to that I needed more notecards. I asked one of the other Hope moms that had also lost a full term baby and had gone on to have a healthy child to send me her list of verses that helped her cope during the last month of pregnancy.

"I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, 

and all over the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you."

Luke 10:19

"There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fears. 

For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears 

has not been perfected in love."

1 John 4:18

"I sought the Lord, and He answers me and delivers me

from all my fears."

Psalm 34:4

"Be strong and courageous. Do not fear or be in dread of them,

for it is the Lord your God who goes with you. 

He will not leave you or forsake you."

Deuteronomy 31:6

"Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life... 

Look at the birds of the air; they neither sew nor reap nor gather into barns,

and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not more valuable than they?

And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his lifespan?"

Matthew 6:25-34

"Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as 

the world gives. Do not let your heart be troubled 

and do not be afraid."

John 14:27

"Do not be afraid, for I am with you;

I will bring your children from the east and 

gather you from the west."

Isaiah 43:5

"But now, this is what the Lord says- He who created you, Jacob [Amy],

He who formed you, Israel: 'Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; 

I have summoned you by name; you are mine."

Isaiah 43:1

       If the last verse sounds familiar, its because it comes from the same book in the Bible that we picked Kaitlyn's verse out of:

"Look at the sky and consider: 

Who created these?

The one who brings out their attendants one by one,

summoning each of them by name.

Because of His might and power,

not one is missing."

Isaiah 40:26

      I tucked these notecards in my work bag and anytime I started to feel the creep of fear coming into my mind I would pull them out and read through them. It didn't matter to me if I stopped in the parking lot of where I was headed or if I needed to pause in the hallway on the way back to the lab. I stopped dead in my tracks and read the promises of God. Honestly, I don't think anything else this world has to offer would have combatted that fear as well as scripture. 

Relief and change

9.19.14-9.23.14

     Once Kaitlyn's birthday had passed, I felt relief. I felt like I could finally get excited about our current pregnancy and I had given myself "permission" to look forward to our upcoming addition without hesitation.
      The only thing that held me back from completely looking forward was the nursery. I hadn't moved anything in the nursery with the exception of taking Kaitlyn's name off the wall. Everything else was exactly as it had been the day we came home from the hospital empty handed; it waited expectantly for use in still silence.
       That week, Alex decided it was time to go through everything and redecorate. I fought him hard on it because I honestly dreaded having to go through everything. Plus, I figured we would have plenty of time because the baby wasn't due for another two months. So I procrastinated, but Alex would have none of that.
       What that meant is that we started pulling out all of the baby things and genuinely deciding whether or not they needed to stay. Alex is a minimalist, but I tend to lean towards the "if one is good, two is better" type of preparedness. It wasn't until we got to the third pack-n-play that I broke down.
        "I was so ready," I said as I let tears run down my face. "I was going to be a really good mom."
        "You are a great mom," Alex said.
        I nodded, but it didn't do much to console me. Going through all of the things that I had bought for our girl was so bittersweet. It reminded me of so many outings where I had over-bought or bought duplicates of things that I really would never use just because I was excited. It reminded me of all of our friends that had celebrated with us and showered us with gifts.

        It reminded me that we were a year behind.
        The things that we had bought last had sat unused for a year. It hurt to be reminded, even though we had just past the one year mark. It hurt to think of the showers and the random gifts that had come in the mail, even after we got home from the hospital empty handed.
        Baby gifts and condolence gifts had come at the same time. They had sat in the front room until they were opened, and some baby gifts were acknowledged with cards from the funeral home saying "thank you" for honoring Kaitlyn. It was so painful to be reminded of the absence of our daughter.
         As we looked around the changed nursery we felt reassured at our decision to not have a baby shower. We had talked about it earlier in the pregnancy and decided that we wouldn't tell anyone the gender until the birth just to keep people (in their sweet, well-meaning ways) from buying us presents that we really didn't need. It was hard for people to understand that, but it was what was best for us until the baby got here safely.

Kaitlyn's Birthday

9.18.14

       I opened my eyes and the sun was whispering through the blinds in our bedroom. Alex was already up and in the living room, and had kindly shut the door on his way out that morning.
       Nearly the second I opened my eyes, I started crying. At first, it was a quiet cry. The kind that nobody knows is happening, but then it started to build.
       I didn't mean to be loud, but somehow Alex heard me in the living room through a shut door. I cried and cried and cried as I looked at the urn that had sat on my nightstand for the past year. Alex came in and didn't say a word, but laid down with me and circled his body around mine. We just laid there for 20 minutes as I cried and couldn't say anything.
        It hurt. It hurt to think about where we were a year ago. It hurt to think about how excited we had been that morning on our way to the hospital and how all I kept saying was how excited I was to meet her. How thankful I had been that Alex had made it home from Afghanistan. It hurt to have the images of her still heart flash in my mind without any prompting.
        It hurt.

        Alex laid with me for a while longer before he eventually got up and started putting on his scrubs to go to work.
        "Are you going to be okay?" he asked me before he left.
        "Yeah, it just is what it is," I told him. I had planned to spend the day writing and drinking decaf coffee at our dining table.
         Little did I know that not 5 minutes after Alex had left, I would get a text from him.
         "I didn't even make it to the first light before I started crying," he said.
         The problem was, my phone was on silent from the night before and I didn't get the text. After a few minutes of me not answering, he ended up calling my work phone which was not on silent. I was little irked that somebody was calling me, but I went to look and see who it was.
         When I answered, Alex asked me in his calm-but-upset voice, "Of all the day to not answer your phone, can we please communicate better today?"
           At that point, I finally read his text.
          "You don't have to go to work, Alex," I had assured him. Luckily, Alex works for an office where everyone knew us when we lost Kaitlyn, so there was no explanation needed. They would understand if he just didn't show up, and they would give us both the grace we needed to mourn our daughter.
           "Just don't go," I urged him. "Come back home, we can go do things that will make the day pass."
           "I just need to drive around," he told me. And that's what he did. For the next hour, Alex just drove.
            After some time, I sent him a text just to check on him and make sure he was okay. He told me he was fine, but that he wanted to go get a haircut and he wanted to know if I would go with him. I met him in the front yard with no makeup and a sweatshirt on.
            I watched at the barber shop as they cut his hair and the dark pieces fell on the floor. His hair is jet black and very thick, and as I stared absently at the pieces on the floor I was reminded of Kaitlyn's dark hair that the nurses had cut locks of and pasted on a piece of paper for us. They had done it with a glue stick and at some point the pieces had started to fall off. I had eventually dropped some mod podge over the ends so that it would stay on the paper better.
            Sometimes when I was sad, I would get the paper out and run my fingers over that hair. Jet black and thick strands, stuck just below a stamp of her footprints. There was some poem on it that I didn't really care enough to memorize, and the nurses had made three copies of it with locks of hair on each of them.
            They could have taken all of her hair and given it to me, and it wouldn't have been enough. She could have left the hospital with a buzz cut and it wouldn't have bothered me one bit. Because that's part of her story. Her hair was such a huge part of her story because I knew that she would come out practically with pigtails because of the heartburn I had suffered.

             We didn't do much the rest of the afternoon. We just stayed with each other and didn't talk about it.
              The one thing I had wanted to do was for Alex and I to take these Chinese lanterns I had found online out and send them off after it got dark. We had scoped out this park just up from our house that had a nice little pond on it, and in my head I envisioned the two of us lighting the lanterns and watching them float up above the water and their reflections fading over the water as they rose in the night.
              Real life rarely happens the way you expect it to, so of course it was a bit windy that night and we struggled to get (and keep) the lanterns lit long enough to get them to rise. But the good news is that we got so tickled at the wind that we ended up laughing quite a bit as we attempted to release the lanterns.

      We sent off two lanterns that night, one hot pink (of course) and one white.

      The summer I had been pregnant with Kaitlyn, I listened to the radio quite a bit while I was driving around for work. There was one song that kept coming on that was by the band Phillip Phillips, and at first I hated it. I thought it was morbid. But like most things that I try to resist, after I had heard it about 15 times I decided that I really liked the beat and the lyrics weren't awful. So I use to sing it to Kaitlyn while we would drive around, and as the part where "like a drum" would play, I would pat on my belly to help her feel the beat (which was almost always recognized with a good hard rub on my rib cage by the top of her head).
      As we watched the lanterns float off in the darkness, I couldn't help but have that song play in my head.

Gone, Gone, Gone

by Phillip Phillips

When life leaves you high and dry

I'll be at your door tonight

if you need help

if you need help

I'll shut down the city lights

I'll lie, cheat, I'll beg and bribe

to make you well

to make you well

When enemies are at your door

I'll carry you away from war

if you need help

if you need help

Your hope dangling by a string

I'll share in your suffering

to make you well

to make you well

Give me reason to believe

that you would do the same for me

And I would do it for you, for you

Baby, I'm not moving on

I'll love you long after you're gone

For you, for you

You will never sleep alone

I'll love you long after you go

And long after you're gone, gone, gone

When you fall like a statue

I'm gon' be there to catch

put you on your feet

you on your feet

And if your well is empty

not a thing will prevent me

tell me what you need,

what do you need?

I surrender honestly

You've always done the same for me

And I would do it for you, for you

Baby, I'm not moving on

I'll love you long after you're gone

for you, for you

You will never sleep alone

I'll love you long after you go

And long after you're gone, gone, gone

You're my backbone

You're my cornerstone

You're my crutch when my legs stop moving

You're my head start

You're my rugged heart

You're the pulse that I've always needed.

Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating

Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating

Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating

Like a drum, my heart never stops beating

For you, for you

Baby, I'm not moving on

I'll love you long after you're gone

for you, for you

You will never sleep alone

I'll love you long after you go.

And long after you're gone, gone, gone

Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating

Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating

Like a drum, baby, don't stop beating

Like a drum, my heart never stops beating for you.

And long after you're gone, gone, gone

I'll love you long after you're gone

gone

gone...

The Day before

9.17.14

      The grief was palpable. I had made an appointment with Kate for the morning before Kaitlyn's birthday. I didn't know what the actual day would bring, and I didn't want to force myself to get out of the house if I needed to just lay in bed all day. So the morning before, I headed out to Kate's office.
      On the way, I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes. I didn't actually cry on the way, but as soon as I went up the stairs and found myself on that familiar couch, I couldn't hold them back anymore.
       "I don't want it to have been a year," I told her through the tears falling down my face. "Its too long. It seems like forever, but at the same time all of the memories are back and strong and I can't make them quit replaying in my head. How do I make them stop?" I begged her for relief.
         Kate slowly shook her head, "You have to feel this one. You have to let your grief be what it needs to be right now."
         "I feel selfish. I should be happy that I'm pregnant. I should be able to celebrate the life that I am carrying right now."
          "Even when you have two living children, you'll find that there are times when one child needs more attention than the other one," Kate said. "This is the time that Kaitlyn needs more attention that this baby, and that's okay. It's not favoring one child over the other, it's just giving each one what they need in the time that they need it."
          "I'm miserable," I continued to confess.
          "This was the first year that I didn't stop functioning completely on Piper's birthday," Kate told me. "Every year up until now I have needed to just stop. To grieve well and to grieve hard and privately."
           "How long did it take you to get there?" I asked.
           "Three years," she said quietly. "It has been three years this year."\

           Almost two year ago, we had heard the testimony of a man at our church who had lost his wife and three kids in a horrific car accident. Little did we know that Mike's story of loss would help us in our own grief, and in the few weeks after losing Kaitlyn we happen to run into him at church when I was picking up a book for a Bible study I had decided to do.
           In that conversation, Mike warned us about what the anniversary would bring this year. He told us that everyone in his family and his wife's family grieved differently, and that we needed to be understanding of the different facets of grief.
           "Some people want to work the day of," he had told us in the lobby of the church. "Other people need to take a few days off and remember. For me, I wanted to work through it and it was always the build up of the day that was worse than the actual day. After it was over, I could do a big sigh of relief. Other people, they wanted to have some kind of 'official' mourning thing and I just couldn't do it. So just remember that in a year."

            "Alex is working tomorrow," I told Kate. "I don't know how I feel about it, to be honest."
            "Let him work through his own stuff. He compartmentalizes a lot of things because that is his training as a soldier. That's okay. Just give him grace and let his grief look the way it needs to," she advised.
         
              Our session came to a close. I started crying again and told Kate thank you for everything she had helped me with. Honestly, I don't know how my grief would have looked without her help.
              "It has been a joy," she said with passion. "You are doing so well, even though you don't feel like it right now."
              "I feel awful," I laughed through the tears again. "I so appreciate you sharing Piper with me, and allowing me to just sit and listen to your story that first day. It helped me more than you will ever realize."
              "It helps me," she said quietly. "It helps me with my own grief."
               It was then I realized, I was following in Kate's footsteps in my own way. All of the grief education and Hope Boxes that I had done over the last year, it was my grief and my honoring Kaitlyn. Kate's calling to honor Piper was to help others by sharing her story as well as listening to theirs.

               I left Kate's office feeling better, but also feeling heavy. I dreaded the next day. I ran a few errands and then went to the house to enjoy the quite for a little while.
               That night, I cried myself to sleep knowing what the next day would bring.
         

The suspense

9.14.14-9.15.14

     The next few days were unbearable. I could see the train coming and there was literally nothing I could do about it but dread its arrival.
      I had decided a long time ago that I wouldn't be working on Kaitlyn's birthday for a few years (at least). Since it fell on a Thursday this year, I knew I would want off the day before because I would be anticipating the day and then it seemed silly to take off Wednesday and Thursday without taking Friday off, so I took that off too.
      On Monday, I went to work at one of my accounts and told them that I would be out the second half of the week.
       "Oh that's nice! I hope you have something fun planned!" said one person.
       Not exactly, and I didn't bother correcting them to tell them why I was off in the first place.

       Monday night, Elyse had planned our monthly Hope Mommies dinner in Richardson and I was glad to have the distraction to go. There were 10 girls that showed up that night, and 4 of them were new to the group.
        We usually start off with going around the table and telling our stories. Its such a great way for us to honor our babies and talk about them, but to also remind each other that we know there is hope for us to see them again.
         As we wait for people to arrive, we tell shortened, clipped versions of our stories. As I mentioned Kaitlyn's name, one of the new mom's stopped me and said, "OH! You're Kaitlyn's mom? I got one of your boxes."
         That was one of the best things anyone could have said to me that week- that I am Kaitlyn's mom. Yes, I am Kaitlyn's mom. And this baby's mom.
 
         I started off by telling Kaitlyn's story. I warned them that I would probably cry telling it because it was so close to our one year anniversary, but as I let the familiar words pour out of my mouth it just became storytelling again. Sometimes, I feel like the whole experience was just a dream and none of it really happened. I only stopped once as my voice caught in my throat, but then I continued to tell the story as I always had.
         We went around the table and I soon discovered that Elyse and I were the "senior" Hope Moms at this dinner. We were both approaching our one year anniversary, and everyone else was less than a year from their loss. Some of the moms were as recent as 6 weeks.

         After we finished dinner, I was thankful that I had met this group of ladies and we had committed to meeting together once a month. I was glad for the excuse to get out of the house, and I was glad that I was able to share Kaitlyn's story again with women who understood so well the pain of that loss.
          I was glad that I was surrounded by four women that night who had all received Hope Boxes that I had either shipped to them or left at hospitals. I was thankful that at the beginning of the hardest week this year, God had used them to remind me that there was still purpose to be seen.
       

Mom's birthday

9.13.14

     I dreaded this day. Not to be melodramatic, but I dreaded this day.
     So much happened on my Mom's birthday the year before. We had all been super excited because Alex was making his way home from Afghanistan and Kaitlyn's arrival was just on the horizon.
      I dreaded this day because it meant that Kaitlyn's birthday was just 5 days away.
 
      Every day that inched closer to the 18th was another day that I relived everything I had been doing the year before. September 13th, 2013 fell on a Friday (my Mom is use to having Friday the 13th birthdays) and I had gone to work that day. But I remember I felt off. I didn't feel well at all. In hindsight, I think I was having contractions, but it doesn't really matter now.
      I had come home from work ready (sort of) to celebrate my mom's birthday. My Dad had come into town to be with us, and the three of us went to a nice steak restaurant about 15 minutes away from the house.
      I remember the exact table we were sitting at, and that my mom and dad were sitting across the table from me. I kept saying that I didn't feel well, and Mom kept asking if I thought I was in labor. She was excited because that meant that she would have a granddaughter share her birthday, just like her mom and my cousin do.
      She asked me a few times if I thought I needed to go to the hospital, but I was never in pain so I never thought it was contractions. I just thought I was tired, or it was false labor, or just plain stress because I didn't know where Alex was at this point.
     
       Later that night, we knew that Alex would be arriving at 11:30 at the DFW airport. Chad and Jenny had come over and we all made signs to welcome him back into the states, and then we all loaded up in my parent's car and headed out. I was driving, and I actually ended up getting pulled over because I was flying down the highway at about 85 mph because I was so excited.
       I remember the absolute joy and relief of seeing Alex again. He was here, we could have a baby now. All of my ill feelings from earlier in the day completely went away once he was here. I could finally relax, everything was going to be fine.
       We've been through two deployments in our marriage, and I use to think to myself that you never really understand trusting God until you send your husband overseas. There is absolutely nothing that I could do to help him or keep him safe while he served our country. I had no control. I had no say in how much he was given to eat or how many hours he was able to sleep. I couldn't tell him that I was uncomfortable with them flying because the weather was bad or that there was gunfire in the area. The days and nights from the US to Afghanistan are nearly completely reversed, so we got into a routine of knowing when the other person would be available to talk between work and sleep, which was usually only a few hours in the morning and a few more at night.
        I use to think that I knew what trusting God with our loved ones was all about, and in a way, I did. But God was also going to show me what trusting Him with the ones we won't see again on this earth was really about.

The Nursery

9.11.14

     Every day we inched closer to the anniversary of Kaitlyn I felt the grief start coming in waves. It would catch me off guard where all of a sudden I was reliving the details of that day from start to finish.
     Kaitlyn's nursery had pretty much stayed untouched for the majority of the year. The exception would be that every now and then I would go into her room and look through the drawers of untouched clothes that had been prewashed and folded neatly to be welcome its new inhabitant. I had started the box of Kaitlyn things, but it held very few outfits as she never wore any of them.
     Alex and I had decided to get new carpet because the carpet throughout our house was the original that was beyond gross. It seemed like a great idea to get this taken care of before the baby gets here, but I didn't take into consideration that when you get new carpet, you have to clean out everything that is on the floor in every room.
     That included the nursery.
     Now, Alex is one of those people who believes in less is more. I, on the other hand, prefer to be completely prepared with multiple sets of everything just in case one goes bad. It makes for a very interesting living arrangement.
     Thursday it was all of a sudden time to clean out everything in the nursery, including the closet. I didn't realize it was happening until half of the contents of the closet were all of a sudden laid out in the kitchen and Alex was asking me why we had so many dang baby carriers.
     "I didn't know which one I would end up liking!" I protested to him when he tried to convince me to narrow it down to one. "And I still don't, so I think I should get to keep them all!"
      That argument didn't fly when he found the three complete pack-n-plays that I had stashed between the guest closet and the nursery closet.
      "One. You need one," he told me.
       At that point, I started crying. It wasn't because of anything Alex said, it was just that realization that I was a really over-prepared mom.
       "Why are you crying?" he asked me gently, afraid that he had hurt my feelings.
       "I am a good mom... I would have been a good mom. Look at all this stuff that I was hoarding in order to take care of her," I said between tears.
       "Of course you're a good mom," he replied.

       Eventually, we made it through all of the things in the nursery. Once the carpet was installed, we decided to rearrange some things to make it a little different for this baby than it was for Kaitlyn. In the end, it was good to purge some of the excess and focus on the things that were really needed for our new addition.

The new normal

9.3.14

     Even in the midst of my sadness, I still had a little one to take care of. At this point, I was grateful that I wouldn't have our second baby here on Kaitlyn's birthday. I felt like it would be harder for me to grieve the way I know I would need to on that day if I were preoccupied with another child.
     When I hit 30 weeks, Dr. B decided that we would start doing Non-Stress Tests (NST) in the office, which is where they hooked me up to two monitors: one for contractions and one for the baby's heart rate. The MA lead me back to a room that was in a "U" shape that contained two dark green recliners in each leg of the "U", each complimented by its own machine to monitor the test.
      For this appointment, I had already seen the baby's heart rate on a sonogram and Dr. B had listened for a minute using a doppler in one of the exam rooms. It was there, when she heard a certain "swoosh" she said, "See, that's the baby moving!" I told her that I had a hard time feeling the movements sometimes, and particularly that day I hadn't felt the baby move much.
      "Okay, let's go ahead and hook you up to a NST. If we don't, you'll probably just go home and worry." So, off I went to the U room and waited to get hooked up to the machine.
       To be honest, I could have laid in that chair all day and listened to this baby's heart beat. It was so comforting just to hear that constant gallop and to hear the swooshes that meant the baby was moving.
       But then, while I sat alone in the room with nothing really to look at but a blank wall, the heart beat stopped.

        It was a sudden stop. I knew that that could only be associated with a roll or a movement of the baby's back away from the probe, but it made my pulse quicken. I started to feel sick because all of a sudden there was the absence of a heart beat on this monitor. I started to talk myself down, "It's okay. You just heard the heart beat on the doppler. You just saw the heart beat on the sonogram. It's okay."

        After a minute of the silence and waiting for the baby to roll back over, I gave up and started moving the probe myself to try to find the heart rate. Eventually, I found the faint noise and pushed the probe into my belly a little further to get a stronger sound.
        It was fine. The heart beat was in the same rate range as it had been earlier, but at that moment I decided I hated NSTs. I felt like I was going to worry more by having to lay here and listen to the heart beat and be the only one in the room. Plus, I hated not having a way to call someone if I felt like the heart rate changed or if there was a sufficient lack of movement.
        But this was the new normal; I would be hooked up to that monitor once a week for the remainder of the pregnancy just to be sure that everything was okay. Because that's how the health care world works. You do the tests to make sure everything is okay because it allows them to "do" something. More monitoring means they are safer. More monitoring means everything is under control...

September Hits

9.2.14

      It's September. I feel like a cloud of sadness just moved over the house. It's just a date, it shouldn't matter that much, but I found that the memories of Kaitlyn have started coming back even more than usual.
      I find myself reliving the events leading up to finding her gone. It happens randomly, while I'm driving to work sometimes, and I feel like I just need to break down. Sometimes I choke it back, sometimes I let the tears flow.
      I miss my daughter.
      I had decided that I wanted to start seeing Kate again as our one year anniversary crept closer, and on the Tuesday after Memorial Day I decided to go see her.
      We talked for a long time about that day. It has been three years since Piper passed away, and Kate told me that their birthdays were very close together. She even told me that she had "officially" moved her birthday to a different day all together because she just couldn't handle her birthday being so close to Piper's. And that this year, on the third anniversary, was the first year she didn't stop functioning.
       That comforted me some. Here was this amazing petite woman, sitting next to me with her legs crossed and the sun hitting her bright red hair, seeming to have it together but telling me that in years past she had lost it. She told me that in her grief, the build up to the day Piper was born was worse than the actual day itself. I begged her for advice- how do I stop the pain? How do I make the memories stop coming at me so quickly? How do I keep it together.
        Kate shook her head and said it was just part of the grief, and that I needed to feel it and not try to bury it.
         I don't want to feel it. I want to hold my daughter again. I want to feel the weight of her. Scratch that- I want to feel the rhythm of her rubbing her head up under my rib cage. I want to feel her kick me deep inside as I complain ignorantly about how huge I feel. I want to run my fingers through that massive amount of black hair, so silky and soft between my fingers.
         I don't want to have these memories so vivid stuck in front of me when I visit a hospital. It doesn't even matter which hospital. I just think about all the women that are in there having babies, some of them who are ill-prepared and some not even wanting a child to begin with.
         My arms start to ache again- that Empty Arm Syndrome that people talk about.

         All summer I had participated in a women's Bible study through Ester written by Beth Moore. The ladies that had surrounded me for the last three years would meet at our house every other week to watch a video from Beth, and we would share our lives together and enjoy each other's company.
         During one of my homework sessions, Beth told the story of her father, who was a World War II Veteran, finding these words inscribed on a wall inside a concentration camp they had just freed:

"I believe in the sun, even when it is not shining

I believe in love, even when I do not feel it

I believe in God, even when He is silent."

-Author Unknown

The big 3-0

8.30.14

     I turned 30 this year, and August 30th is my birthday.
     We had taken a trip earlier in August to celebrate both mine and Alex's big birthdays, so in a way I felt like I had already celebrated that. When I woke up Saturday morning, all I felt was sadness.
     It wasn't unlike the way I felt on Mother's Day. I missed my Kaitlyn. Even though we are so incredibly blessed to have another baby on the way so soon, I still miss my daughter. I miss that I can't hold her, and I miss that I am another year older without her here. It just feels so wrong some days.
      I finally peeled myself out of bed and went and sat on our living room couch. I just started crying and I couldn't control it. I needed to grieve the things that I was still missing. Last year should have been my last year without a kiddo here. And now I was going through the same motions again since we are pregnant. This year should be our last year without a kiddo.
      The thought still scares me.
      My mom and I have birthdays that are exactly 2 weeks apart. One of the things I loved about Kaitlyn was that she was going to be born so close to my mom's birthday, so I would always feel about her birthday the way I felt about me and my mom having birthdays so close. It was just one of those mother/daughter things that was special even though you never really talked about it. I looked forward to having birthday parties close together, and we would probably have even celebrated my mom and daughter's birthday on the same day some years (for convenience's sake).
      But now, I started to dread what September would bring. Even though I should have been happy on my birthday, I dreaded it because it was so close to September. One measly day away from September. I use to kid my mom about not being able to hold me in for another 48 hours because the birthstone for August is just so awful and September is a sapphire. She told me to wait and see how it felt to have contractions and then give her a hard time about not holding me in that long.
      Which brings up a whole other point: September's birthstone is Sapphire. If Kaitlyn had been a boy, this would have little to no meaning. But I had always been envious of all the pretty sapphires in the birthstone collection for girls, and I was really excited about being able to accessorize Kaitlyn with the sparkling blue stones. I like sapphires so much that my original engagement ring didn't even have a diamond as the center stone- it had a sapphire. The ring I wear now, and the one you see in the pictures of Kaitlyn, was a very generous upgrade from my sweet husband because he wanted people to know I am taken. But even in this ring, the diamond is flanked by two dark blue sapphires. Which, in a way, makes me love my ring even more.
       Alex's original wedding ring got lost somewhere over the mountains of California about 2 years ago. He flew in helicopters as a combat medic in the Army, and in part of his training they went to California to practice maneuvers and rescues. Alex had lost some weight since before we got married (he wore his wedding ring when he did a year-long tour in Iraq because I wanted everyone to know that he was engaged), so his ring never really fit him right. One day, they were flying with the doors open in the helicopter and Alex took his glove off and the ring slipped off his finger and flew out the door. He was really upset because he had worn that ring for two years and it represented so much to him.
      I was just glad he didn't go after it out the door.
      And I wasn't super upset because I had wanted him to get a ring that fit correctly anyways. So Alex got a new band to wear, and the now he calls it Kaitlyn's ring because its the one that she had on her little feet in the pictures we have.

      Anyways, this year my birthday was really difficult because I felt the void. I felt like I should have had more going on than we did. And I just felt this pit in my stomach begin to build with the doom of September so close and Kaitlyn's birthday coming up so soon.
      Alex comforted me by reminding me that it wasn't written for her to be here, but I still felt like I was in a funk all day.

The things people say

8.23.14

     Sometimes, people try to say the right thing, or just plain don't have a filter and sometimes you want to look at them sideways when they say things to you.
      The first incidence of this was earlier in our pregnancy, maybe about week 19 or so, when one of the nurses I work with was talking to me about how I feel with this pregnancy. It was only towards the end of the conversation that one of those things just came out of her mouth.
       "How far along are you again?" she asked.
       "19 weeks..." I replied.
       "Oh you're good then," she replied, as if nothing could ever go wrong after week 12.
       "Well I'll never really be good until I get a screaming child in my arms." I responded softly.
       "You know what I mean, statistically you're good," she shrugged.
        Statistics. Statistics are what creep into my head late at night when I let my guard down and start thinking about how naive to this world I was a year ago. 1 in 160 pregnancies end in stillbirth, that's not a small number. I didn't say 1 in 1000, I didn't say 1 in 1500. 1 in 160. And stillbirth is just the tip of the iceberg because it doesn't even include losses before 20 weeks gestation.
         Statistically, lightening shouldn't strike twice. Statistically, you're safe flying on an airplane. But statistics are just a way of rationalizing ourselves out of fear for the most part.

        On Saturday, I had plans to go to Elyse's baby shower. It was so cool to get to celebrate with her, because when she was pregnant with Emma Kate she didn't have any showers because they knew that she wouldn't make it. It hurts my heart for her just to type that.
        Saturday morning I packed up myself and drove down to Dallas about 20 minutes. There, I meandered through the neighborhood with the big, shady trees and houses that were mostly set up above the street so you'd have to take stairs up to the front of the house.
        The shower was held at her sister-in-law's house, and it was absolutely gorgeous with skylights letting the morning sun pour in to the living room. All around the house were pink decorations, and off to the side was a cute little buffet with snack food for all the women.
         Elyse and I hadn't known each other but about 6 months (seems like a lot longer!), but our other friend Lauren was also planning to come. Lauren had lost her baby boy, John Luke, last November, and Elyse and I had met her at the retreat. I was amazed at Lauren having the courage to attend a retreat a mere 2 months after her loss, and as she told the story of how John Luke had lost his heart beat during labor, I cried with her at the sudden loss and knowing how that feels. Lauren had also gotten pregnant around the same time as me and Elyse, and her boys would be Irish twins, her second baby being born a week before John Luke's first birthday.
          Lauren was running a little bit late that morning, so I sat a little awkwardly around a group of women that I didn't know and waited for the present opening to begin. Eventually, one lady came and sat next to me and asked the question I should have prepped for but had completely forgotten about.
          "So," she started, "How do you know Elyse?"
          Crap. It's not that I was ashamed or embarrassed that we had both lost our babies, it was just more of being the "debbie downer" in the room. I hated that on this day, when we were celebrating life, that I would be the reminder of the loss that had come less than a year ago for both of us.
           "Oh, um..." I started. "We met through a group called Hope Mommies."
            A look of recognition on her face, and then she leaned forward and lowered her voice to say, "Oh I'm so sorry for your loss. What is your story?"
            Again, I have to tell you this is one of the most awkward situations ever. I'm proud to be Kaitlyn's mom, and I know that Elyse is proud to be Emma's mom, but at the same time it is so hard to be "that person" in the room. People don't know how to react to you.
             I told her the short version of Kaitlyn's birth, and at the end she was nodding with recognition because I guess Elyse had told her my story just like I have told hers.
             After a minute or two, she said, "You know, your story scares me the most."

             Bless her.

             Our story scares me, too. To not have any warning that your child wasn't going to make it and at the very end of a pregnancy being pulled into a world of loss and grieving you never knew existed. It's still insane to me that this is my life. That this is truly what happened to our precious baby girl. Some days, it just feels like a horrible nightmare. It feels like none of that really happened.
             Other days, it is so real its tangible. I can feel Kaitlyn's soft hair between my fingers as I twirled it out of the little mohawk that the nurses had styled it in. I remember the weight of her in my arms.
              Yes, our story scares me. But I know, there is purpose in her story. There is always purpose in the pain.

Hope Mommies Dallas

8.12.14

      On Tuesday after our big trip to Vegas, the local area Hope Moms were doing a dinner at a little Italian restaurant. Sweet Elyse had thought this up after the group that met at her house weekly for Bible study through Hope Mommies ended and none of the girls wanted to quit meeting. So instead, we implemented a monthly dinner for moms in the area to get plugged in.
       This particular meeting was small: there were only four of us total that were able to come including me and Elyse. The other two girls were Michelle, who had lost her son Jaxon last November, and Jenny, who had recently lost her daughter in July. Jenny was just a month out from her loss, and we went around the table to share our stories before she shared her daughter with us.
        When it was my turn to speak, I talked about how heavy September was already weighing on me and how much I wasn't looking forward to the month. I knew that the lead-up to the day Kaitlyn was born was going to be awful because I would probably be reliving every day as the dates matched up. Luckily, Elyse knew exactly what I was talking about because our anniversary dates with our daughters are so close together: she lost Emma Kate on Sept. 26, a week and a day after we had Kaitlyn.
          There are few phrases that Hope Moms tend to use when it comes to an anniversary and a subsequent pregnancy. This is going to be a partial rant because one of the phrases really bothers me, and the other really bothers Elyse. The one that I really don't care for is that moms will post about their babies and then finish their thoughts with, "One year closer to seeing you in Heaven." Now, realistically, I get it. I know that we are, in fact, one year older and one year closer to seeing our babies again. However, I really don't like that it feels like we are counting down to our death. I don't think that honors our children, and it certainly doesn't honor God. If we were meant to have a countdown like that, I think God would have given us the knowledge of our individual death dates to actually count down to instead of keeping us in the dark about them. I also really don't like this phrase because I think it negates our purpose here, which is something I have always felt passionate about. God didn't make a mistake by leaving us and taking our babies. He left us here because He has purpose for us, and because there are tasks that need to be completed before we get to go to Heaven to be with them.
          The phrase that bothers Elyse is the term "Rainbow baby." This is the name that some Hope Moms use when they are pregnant with their next child after their loss. I don't mind the phrase that much, but it certainly implies that our loss was a storm of epic proportions. Is the loss of a child beyond what most losses are? Absolutely, but at the same time it implies that there was nothing good about the time, that it was all darkness and rain. That's not how I feel about Kaitlyn at all; I'd rather picture rain clouds with streaks of sunlight coming through.
           However, Elyse made a really interesting point that night at dinner when we were hashing out out our thoughts about these two phrases over dinner.
           "I hate that term, 'rainbow baby', because it implies that God is making a promise to us that can't be broken, a covenant. This child," she paused and put her hand on her belly, "is not promised to me. She is a gift from God, but she is not promised. She is His first."
           I agree with Elyse about our children not being our own, but at the same time, there are some powerful scriptures about faith when it comes to our kiddos:

"Take delight in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart."

Psalm 37:4

"By faith even Sarah was given the ability to conceive, though she herself was barren

and past the age for having children, because she believed that the one

who made the promise was faithful."

Hebrews 11:11

Dirty Thirty

8.7.14

     This year, Alex and I are both turning 30. We decided last year when we were still expecting Kaitlyn that we were going to go to Vegas with our best friends, Chad and Jenny to celebrate and leave Kaitlyn with my parents to babysit. It would probably be the first time that we had left her alone for any significant amount of time, and I had anticipated it being one of those "mom moments" where you realize that you need to be a wife first and a mom second.
       I didn't know if I was going to want to go to Vegas now that Kaitlyn was gone, but it turned out to be a really great distraction from the August blues I had been experiencing. We stayed in a fancy hotel and ended up seeing a couple of shows.
       Our birthday dinner ended up being at the "Top of the World" restaurant on the north end of the strip. It's one of those revolving restaurants that gives you a view of everything around Vegas, including all the houses that make you realize that people actually live in Vegas and don't just come there to visit.

Birthday Dinner

     We ended up going to see the Cirque du Soleil tribute to Michael Jackson, who is one of my favorite artists of all time. At the end, they had a hologram of Michael that the performers danced with, and it was pretty phenomenal that they could make it look like he was actually there with us.

My Uncle Kenney, Aunt Mary, Chad, Jenny, Mom, Dad, Alex, Me and Aunt Lou.