New Year

It is almost the new year.
New year, new start.
New hope.
I love the idea of making resolutions, of a new start new possibilities. The idea that all your problems can be fixed by making a list and everything will be better.  I think most people like the idea.

me and my sister in 1992

Most people end up breaking there resolutions before the first full week of January. 

Still, I have hope that 2011 will be better.
I am going to work on myself on doing things that I have stopped doing.
Doing more creative things: art, writing, crafting; working on the house; finding peace in my life.
Finding organization for things.
Organizing my chaos. 
Be happy that is the biggest most important resolution of them all.

Good news

Yesterday I went in to the doctors office to get a blood draw and a check up. Good news, iron levels are back up and I'm no longer anemic. It's nice to have something go well. One less hurtle to face.
The only bad thing is the doctor was saying that we should wait 6 months till we try again.
 I don't know if we will wait that long, but we may wait a little longer than we had planned to just to make sure.

We have been going to the pool and I've gotten out the work out dvd's out. My new years resolution is to work hard get getting healthy for baby to be. I just feel like I owe it to both babies (our son and  baby to be) to take this seriously and work hard getting as healthy as I can. It wasn't like I was lacking when we got pregnant last time but there where moments that I slacked off.  When I didn't follow the Brewers diet, didn't go to the pool. I know that this time there will not be that sort of "oh lets just have pizza, and skip the gym" moments. Gone are the high fructose corn syrup, the ingredients that are hard to say, we've even given up the lotions and things that go on our skin that don't get a good score on skin deep a great website that rates products based on how safe the ingredients in them are.

Family

I am lucky, my family is amazing, they have been supportive. They get it, as much as anyone can.
My husband called my mom, and my mother-in-law from the waiting room of the hospital while I was in surgery. I can't even imagine what that phone call was like, to make or get.

My mother in law drove down to our house, with a packet of information on miscarriage, and flowers. She talked to me, while Rob slept, I was so hyper from the medications, that I couldn't sleep. That weekend my mom drove the 6.5 hours from Portland to Moscow to be there when we buried our baby.

We had put our baby in the freezer, later I took the hospital receiving blanket that my MIL brought and cut a small corner of it and wrapped our baby up, my mom knit a blanket that we wrapped him in as well.
 Its very surreal to go shopping for a box to bury your baby in. We went to a major shopping center and bought a plastic container and then to another store where we found a wooden jewelry box that the 1st box fit in.

When we buried our baby,  my sister in law and her family came. Other family members reached out telling us how sorry they where, supporting us. I cannot imagine what it would be like to go through this with out having a family that cares. I feel lucky that we have all this support. That is what I am thankful for this holiday season.

disappointment

Story of  my life,   I think that I have things figured out and then I get smacked down by life.
The job would have been perfect. I didn't get, they hired someone before they even interviewed me. Which bugs me more than interviewing and not getting it. At least interview me when you said you where going to. 
So I'm stuck in a job I am growing to dread, with no real out,  I feel so stuck and was so upset yesterday the dog hid under our bed.
I know that things will work out and that what happens is what happens. I can only control how I react.
Can things just start going well, please, I honestly don't think that I can handle anymore hard life character building. Can't I get some of that happy life character building, please?

Waiting

Yesterday I posted about the mounds of paperwork and stress that we are buried under. Today we had our interview and now we just have to wait to see if we get approved. Later this week I have a job interview and so we are stuck in a purgatory situation for a while.

  I hate waiting, I have no patience for anything, I want it all right now, It drives Rob crazy that I want to know what I'm getting for Christmas, what the surprise is, everything this minute. This year the whole Christmas seasons lost some of its bubbly excitement. Our tree is up, our house is decorated, but not with they same flair and excitement that I usually have. I'm ready for it to be over, ready to take down the tree, pack away the decorations and move on. Sad really, I feel like I'm on holiday auto pilot. I lack the proper amount of holiday cheer and no amount of sugar cookies or twinkling lights is going to fix that. So I am waiting for the holidays to be over and the sugar high of December to give way to broken resolutions, and gloomy depression of January.

paper work

I have no insurance, which means on top of all the stress and emotional stuff from losing our baby, we have to deal with the stress and paperwork of assistance.
I've been told I don't qualify because I'm not pregnant, because my husbands part time, minimum wage job pays to much, now I have to give them every piece of paper I have touched in the past 6 months, go to an interview and may be, just maybe, they can set up some sort of payment plan. Chances are tt would probably have us paying the hospital for the next 40, 50 years.
It just sucks.
 The hospital can treat you like dirt for not being insured and charge you a huge amount of money to do it.
Medicaid is the worst, why they would punish you for trying to be a good person, for having a job, paying your bills, and then suddenly being hit with something huge. Its not like we don't want to be insured, its just not that easy to find a job with insurance.  Hospitals get to make up what ever amount they want to charge because, really what choice do you have, it leaves us stuck.

Hopefully the meeting goes well they help us, and later this week I have an interview for a new job, I am hopeful that things will work out.

Thrift Shops

Don't you just love thrift shopping?  The thrill of getting something really cool for practically nothing. I am a thrift shop queen. I find things, good things, things that new or of eBay would be very expensive, for great prices.

Just today I got this  chair.  for 3 dollars! It is missing the cushions, but those are so easy to make. It will match our 1960's coffee table very well and it is about the same color wood as our dinning room table so it will tie together the dinning room and living room haves of our house well.  We needed a sitting chair to make our living room a little more user friendly. I'm thinking that it is a Danish modern lounge chair, not a outdoor chair as the thrift shop labeled it. I love the Danish modern style and its a pretty popular vintage style right now, Type danish lounge chair into Google shopping and they are all above 100 dollars, so I think I got a great deal.

Mommy

I have written a little about the fact that I'm a nanny. Baby J was 2 months old when I started watching him he is now 2 years old. Today he was at our house thundering around yelling "mommy" at  me. "mommy read this." "mommy sit" He has always called me "mommy", and I have always called him "baby". Just around the time that we lost the baby he started calling me Carlie occasionally but for the most part its still mommy.  It's bittersweet we have a bond, but now having him call me mommy makes me want to cry. I cuddle with him in our bed read Pajama Time, rocked him and sang 'I've been working on the railroad' (it is the only lullaby that works) and put him down for a nap in our bed under a lime green hippo blanket, theses are things I should be doing with my baby come March and won't.

When we 1st lost the baby, the kids mom kept calling asking if we needed anything, saying they could just swing by. I didn't want to see baby J. I dreaded seeing C and  F, didn't want to go into the whole where is the baby conversation. It took a few days before I could see them, could deal with going back to work, when I did go back things where OK, different but OK.

In heaven, under the ground

When our dog died in 2009, the kids that I watch, discussed where Bear had gone in the way that 3 and 4 year olds do. "He's in Heaven under the ground." was the consensus. When someone dies they go to heaven and they get buried.

We had gone for an ultrasound to check on the baby and they had stopped by afterward. C's mommy told her that we had gotten pictures of the baby. C gave us the look you give someone who's trying to pull a fast one and said that you can't take a picture of something in your tummy. Then she said. " Could you hear the baby crying?"
I didn't see them again until after our baby died, C asked me about it on the car ride home one day.

"You had a baby in your tummy." she said "But now there is no baby in your tummy."
"That's right" I told her, "Our baby died because he came out of my tummy too soon and he was too small"
"So, he is in heaven under the ground." She said, "Why did he die?"
I told her that babies have to stay in their mommies tummies for a long time and that our baby didn't stay in long enough and he was too little. That he was in heaven under the ground and that we had buried him at his grandmas house. 
"But my mommy had babies in her tummy and we didn't die." She said.
I told her that  that was because when they where babies they stayed in their mommies tummy until they where big enough to come out.
It is probably one of the hardest conversations to have, how do you explain the senselessness of the whole thing? a specially to a child. It isn't something anyone should have to do.
A few days after we had this conversation her older brother F said "Your baby died."
I told him "That's right." 
C said "He's at his grandmas house"

a Hobbits Life

Not the fuzzy footed guys obsessed  with jewelery, rather the secluded recluse locked away from the world. There is a part of me that feels I could quite happily disappear beneath my comforter and never come out. Even now there is part of me that flickers with jealousy and darkness when I see pregnant women or brand new babies.
After our baby died I just wanted to disappear. I didn't want to write the facebook post saying our baby is dead, didn't want to tell the Bradly class we didn't need to come anymore. A lot of people jump back into work, but my work is babies.
I work as a nanny for three kids F who is 5, C who is 4, and babyJ who just turned 2. Kids who where excited that their was a baby in my tummy. Kids that I was dreading having a conversation with. I have gone back to work, but it's not the same as it was before. Its much easier to take care of someone else kids when you think that having your own is easy.
No matter how much I want to disappear, hideaway from people, it's not practical or healthy. So I go out and pretend to be normal and try and act like the babies, that seem to be everywhere, don't make my heart stop for a second. Maybe there will be a day that I don't have to act anymore when I will feel like a normal person and not have to just act like one.

Late

Waiting, debating the possibility of  two pink  lines.
What would it mean to be pregnant again? To be due in August.
Are we ready to do this again?  To potentially end up without a baby again.
What happens if the little lines appear what happens if we have to go though this again?
I could go out and get a test, I could take it but then, if what happens if its positive?
It's interesting the 1st time we were so excited there is a innocence that we would get pregnant and nine months later we would have a baby. This time we know a positive test doesn't mean a baby doesn't mean anything. We are jaded.  Guarded against the pain.
I wrote the first bit a few days ago and the second today
We aren't pregnant, won't be having a little Leo baby. Which is a good thing. We aren't trying, aren't ready to tackle the emotion that would come with being pregnant. We want to wait until January. New year, new baby.

I was worried about how I would react to not being pregnant as much as how I would react to being pregnant. The 1st period was hard. I Thought it would be a relief that it would be one step closer to getting better. It was horrible, I was an emotional wreck, it was a shocking realization that it was truly over. This time however its easier, aside from being very late,  I feel at peace with it all.

Decaf

I ordered a coffee at our local coffee shop and said "oh make it decaf please," The barista eyes lit up and she whispered across the table "Can I ask, are you pregnant?"

To my knowledge I'm not pregnant. It is just the first time around, I gave up coffee months before we were ready to start trying to have a baby. I don't want to go back to fully caffeinated and then have to go cold turkey. Its hard enough to be an emotional wreck from pregnancy hormones with out adding withdraw to the combination. I love my husband and so I've started giving up the caffeine now.

I was talking to our friend J and Rob about how I wasn't that crazy hormonal mess when I was pregnant. J was kind enough to remind me of the time I threw my coffee cup at Rob's head.
I'd forgotten about that. So to make every ones life a little easier that is no more caffeine.
The coffee shop is just one more reminder of how different it is when everyone knows that you were pregnant. Its a reminder that everyone eyes are on my mid section watching to see if it grows in the direction of a baby.

grief food

Can you smother emotions with cookies?
Oreos are grief food.
When my dad died, suddenly and with out warning when I was thirteen, people filled our house with groceries. It was amazing the kindness and compassion the people in our neighborhood had. The only issue was that, it was highly processed and almost all of it contained milk. Both my mom and sister are allergic to milk. Which meant that the only person who could eat all the Oreos was me. Nothing like stuffing myself  with cream filled cookies to deal with grief. Filling the void with double stuffed chocolate cookies. Its been years but Oreos still hold the connotation of death and grief.
When my baby died I had to have Oreos. I told Rob that we needed Oreos. I gave myself a weekend and a lot of cookies, an attempt to fill a hole that had once held a baby. I reached a point when I didn't want any more Oreo cookies, the creamy filling was not as satisfying as I wanted it to be and the hole was still there. 
It was a significant moment when I looked down at my cookie and said I'm done.

You can only wallow in self pity for so long before it is unhealthy, tinting life with a dirty film of resentment.  I gave myself a week and a lot of Oreos to feel bad to lay in bed and soak in my pity. Then I brushed the cookie crumbs off the duvet and moved on. Not finished with grief but finished with the pity. 

Secret club

Everyone is so happy for you when you get  pregnant.
When you miscarry suddenly you start hearing whispers, women pull you over and tell you that they have been there. Low voices offering words of understanding. You can know people for years without knowing that they had their heart smashed into pieces.
A secret club of the lost babies, society is so adamant that miscarriage is something talked about in whispers, if  you have to talk about it at all. It makes people more uncomfortable than the death of a living person, or even the death of a pet.
Even women who have had a baby seem to forget  how attached you get to the person growing inside you. Pain of miscarriage is dismissed. It is to hard, I think, for people to look directly at it. Maybe its the senselessness of it, the destruction of an event that other wise should be pure joy. For whatever reason people have been given the wrong idea that telling someone that their baby was deformed/bad makes the pain lesson. "It probably would have been disabled. This is a good thing." "It probably had something wrong with  it, it was a bad baby" As if a mother can see her child as anything other than amazing, as if a disabled baby is worse than a dead one.
Statistically speaking early miscarriage can be from a problem in the dna. Late miscarriage is usually something else. My miscarriage was a placenta failure, my baby was perfect. It was my body that failed him. I failed him. The anger that bubbles up when some well meaning person says you must have had a deformed baby is hot and blurs my ability to take people for their intent. 
If the secret club would stop having to whisper, would stop being secret, we would all have to alone a little less.

A Pregnancy in Fruit

from a poppy seed to an avocado 
There is a popular website that has a pregnancy ticker in produce. Starting with a poppy seed.and getting bigger each week. For 16 weeks 6 days my life was defined in produce. Each week I watching the fruit ticker get bigger from apple seeds, raspberries, and ending on an avocado. 
Contextualizing in food is something I understand. I could hold a blueberry in the palm of my hand and say "this is how big my baby is." I never really got into the pictures of fetuses drawn like bad fishy aliens, but  I liked the fruit. If I was still pregnant our baby would be a an eggplant, 26 weeks. Instead, I just ended up somewhere between an Avocado and an Onion.

Oddly appropriate onions have always made me cry, and I've never been a huge avocado green fan. I wonder if there will be a day when I can look at an avocado with out thinking of holding his little body in my hand. A day with out thinking about the impossibly small fingers and toes, those little fingernails. I don't think I will ever be able to look at guacamole the same.