On the feast of Saint Lucy

I hardly ever write about seriously stuff. Sometimes I do, sometimes I sound a lot more serious than I am actually trying to be. My days are plenty serious, but I try to keep this blog as more of an outlet for making my days feel less serious, finding the humor in things like vomit, diarrhea, violent angry toddler tantrums, etc... Either way, today I am going to mix things up and be semi-serious.

See, look how serious I am

It is the feast of Saint Lucy today, a big one in our house since this is the first year that we have our own little Lucy to celebrate with. I will probably bake some cookies that she can't eat in honor of the day, any excuse to load up on sugary baked goods.

It was also a year ago today that I found out I was expecting our baby that we lost, Ignatius John.
I've read so many great posts on miscarriage and the loss of babies, many that have been extremely comforting and inspiring. I am not trying to write one of those and definitely not trying to preach about anything. I have only lost one baby so far and it was a very early miscarriage, not that that lessens the loss, but I don't feel like I have a bunch of wisdom or inspiration to offer anyone, maybe comfort, but that would be by accident.

Today just has me thinking about how the little baby that we lost, even though we never got to hold him or see him on an ultrasound, has changed me in a lot of ways that I did not expect.

Before we concieved Naomi I had some weird unfounded fears of infertility and for a few days thought a lot about what it would be like to never be given a child-- then a whole 3 weeks after our honeymoon we found out we were expecting her and the fears went out the window. I had a teeny bit of bleeding at the begining of that pregnancy where I worried about miscarriage but then it went away and so did my worries.

After giving birth to Naomi I felt like I was punched in the face with the difficulties that accompany motherhood: the discomforts, the sleep loss, the innumerable things that a baby does to mess with my routine and all the things I wanted or needed to do, even just go to the bathroom-- my attitude became pretty sour.

Then when Naomi was 9 months old we conceived Bernadette. When we found out about the pregnancy I spent most of the day crying, worrying and being completely scared and overwhelmed. How was I going to get through the first few months of feeling awful with a baby to care for? How was I going to continue to nurse her? What my milk dried up and couldn't nurse anymore?

And it was really hard. Naomi has always been a ridiculously early riser, so the 5 a.m. mornings feeling like I was going to barf and trying to stay awake to care for her were really tough. Miscarriage certainly never entered my thoughts. Fertility had started to become a burden in my mind by this point. We had gotten pregnant 2 times in a row first shot out of the box, all the typical pregnancy symptoms followed, and then we had a healthy perfect baby. This was just what happened to an ultrafertile gal like myself. Or so I thought.

Once Bernadette was 3 months old I started freaking out about the possibility of becoming pregnant again, I was an anxious wreck any time I felt even a twinge of nausea for many months, even though my fertility did not even return until she was 10 months old. I had talked a lot about wanting a huge gap between kid 2 and 3. I had finally lost all the weight from both pregnancies and then some, I was happy with how I felt and looked and we had a great routine and good schedules for the girls. Changing that did not sound fun.

Conversations surrounding openness to life for me and Mike often ended in an argument because I was sure that he just did not understand all that I would be burdened with if we got pregnant again. The conversations always left me feeling put upon and overwhelmed. After all, I was the one who was going to bear this child, I was the one who would get sick, feel exhausted, not enjoy eating for months, and everything else that goes along with pregnancy. I would be the one who would give birth to the baby. I would be the one losing most of he sleep after the baby came, etc...

Eventually I softened to the idea of another baby and, of course, the first time we "were open" to getting pregnant, we got pregnant. I had a feeling that I was since I was having some of the symptoms that I typically have leading up to finding out, then on December 13, 2011, we got the positive pregnancy test. I was actually really excited, unexpectedly so for me. I only cried from feeling overwhelmed a couple times, but mostly I cried tears of joy.

You can read the rest of that experience here.

We found out that we miscarried only 3 weeks after finding out we were expecting.
It obviously did not take long for us to conceive again after we lost that baby. However the difference in my attitude leading up to conceiving Lucy and after finding out we were expecting her was worlds different. In the weeks of waiting to get pregnant again after miscarrying I would have given anything to be pregnant. I was so scared of how long it would take us, and had no expectation whatsoever that we would conceive quickly, although I was hopeful that we would.

All of the sudden my fertility became in my mind what it is: a gift, a completely undeserved and gratuitous gift. And another baby became in my mind what it actually is: a person who belongs first to God who gives him/her to me to have as a gift. I always knew these things, but at some point I had stopped acting like this was the case. After the miscarriage I would find myself just staring at Noami and Bernadette feeling so badly for taking their coming into existence so for granted and feeling more grateful than ever that they had been given to me.

Finding out that we were pregnant with Lucy was surreal and so exciting and so different than any other time finding out- it felt so precarious. I was sure at so many points during the pregnancy that we were going to lose her. I remember saying to Mike one night how amazed I was going to be if nothing went wrong and if we actually got to hold this baby. I spent so much time- too much time- worrying that something would go wrong.

But there was a real change that will probably always remain: I knew this baby was a freely given and undeserved gift and that I was not in control of it. It did not feel like a burden, but a gift. A gift that would ask lots of sacrifice, yes, but still a gift. And since Lucy's birth I have stared at her in a new way, a way that I couldn't have if I had never lost the baby before her.

If children are given to us to aid in our conversion, than Ignatius' life has done more from his mere 5 weeks on earth than I ever would have imagined and I am eternally grateful.

Happy feast day! 

Things they'll remember...

I started writing this post last week, which is something that rarely happens. It isn't that I am a shallow person, I just tend toward more shallow, short blog posts. I don't generally spend more than 15 minutes writing any one post, that is how I keep this thing going.
So last week when I started to write this I realized that it was going to require some extra thought and probably an extra 15 minutes or so, and I just wasn't sure if it was worth it, I think it is. My last thoughtful post was on our little Ignatius and this post is a little spin off of that, but since I have delayed so in finishing it, it has already changed a bit.

After our recent loss, I found myself spending many more hours of our days just sitting with my girls. Playing with them on the floor gratuitous amounts each day, reading more books to them than I generally do, sitting and eating with them at the breakfast table in stead of loading the remnants of last night's dishes into the dishwasher, just staring at them,. etc, you get the point. I was soaking so much more in than I ever had before and it hit me that of everything that happens in our days, those are the thing they will remember. For almost 2 weeks after our miscarriage, I held my girls more tightly than I ever had. I neglected an overwhelming amount of housework and phones calls to insurance companies to just sit with them. It was the best I ever felt during my time as a mother.

I love my mother with my whole heart and she is the reason that I am who I am today (a Catholic woman, striving to be holy and love the Lord instead of lying dead in a gutter somewhere. Exaggeration? Maybe, but maybe not) My mother is phenomenal. She bore and raised 8 children who are all grown and practicing Catholics- not bad. The main thing that I remember of my mom growing up was how well she kept the house. She was constantly moving, taking care of us, cleaning, feeding us, cleaning, busing us around, cleaning some more. Although I know how well she kept our home, the things that stick out the most to me upon real reflection are the quiet moments spent with her. I remember her homeschooling me through preschool, I remember coming home from school and eating in the kitchen while she talked to us, and her giving me back scratches in the evening before bed. I am sure she wishes that she would have gotten more of those moments with me and my siblings now that we are all grown. I feel sure of this because I already feel this way and I only have a 2 1/2-year-old and a 1-year-old. I can feel the days slipping by and it feels so pointless to have spent any day doing more house work than actually spending time with these precious girls.

But those other duties call and I have to answer: so the juggling has commenced. It breaks my heart that I cannot just sit and have long conversations with Naomi about who she wants to marry more: Robin Hood or Peter Pan (it is a serious struggle for her). Or just hold my little Bernadette on my lap for as long as she will sit there and smother her with as many kisses as she'll let me give. At some point I have to switch the laundry around or it will mildew, I have to load the dishes or the food will harden and attract bugs, I have to clean the bathroom because it smells like urine... These things are good and are helping me work out my salvation, but while I am doing them my heart is with my girls because that is where it is meant to be.

I am sure that the struggle to find and seize quiet moments with my little ones will only get harder, especially if God blesses us with more children, but I will continue to struggle because there is nothing more worth while. I am know how imperfect I am and how many unflattering moments I give them to remember me by each day, I just hope that I can outweigh the not-so-good moments with enough sweet ones for them to remember.

Normalcy

Things are starting to get back to "normal" around here, whatever that means. 

That is the thing about going through trying times with babies and toddlers- they really couldn't care less about your troubles, they have plenty of their own issues like: wanting 7 packs of fruit snacks and only being allowed ONE or preferring to watch 4-5 videos a day and only being plopped in front or 2 or 3. It really is a hard life. 

Although they were the ones in desperate need of come normalcy, I have also been craving some semblance of normal in our days.
So now I am getting dressed every day and even going out and doing some things, which has actually been very nice. I even got back to my whopping 20 minute workout yesterday, watch out. It is literally 20 minutes since I cut out the warm up and cool down to save time, Jillian would be disappointed.

So in my attempt to offer my girls something more fun during the day than me laying on the floor and them sit around me/climbing on me and less mind warping then watching disney movie after disney movie, we ventured out side. We've had a real heat wave the last couple of days with temperatures spiking into the low 40s, and I refuse to go outside in anything colder, so here we are:

hyper and special

Danger: I can fit my hair into a little nub of a pony tail now, life will never be the same

marshmallow

So that's one little slice of the pie of our days recently, stay tuned for more.

Ana

Our Christmas with Ignatius John

Sorry for the lack of posting around here. There's been something of a Big Issue that I've been coping with the last week or so and I felt stuck when it came to blogging- I just didn't feel like I could post anything about life without referring to the Big Issue, and I couldn't bring myself to blog about said Big Issue. So I decided it was best not to post anything at all.

Till now.

I had been planning on waiting to post on the current state of things in my life, but the guy next door decided to run his industrial sounding snow blower right in the middle of nap time preventing me from napping and making my anxiety level concerning him waking the slumbering little ones go up about a million notches, so this seems like as good a time as any. The Big Issue is this: last week I learned that I miscarried our newest little one, baby #3, and it has crushed me like no other sorrow I have ever known. In writing about this, I honestly don't know where to begin or what to say, but I want to tell the whole story, even just for the sake of finally putting these thoughts and feelings on (virtual) paper. I will give a disclaimer that I may be crying while typing- this is no rosy blog post and I probably won't be doing much to sugar coat anything. Also, it will be long, to ensure that folks will only read it if they actually care enough to stick out the long read. Ok, here goes.