Monday, October 27, 2008

The fastest year of my life

Over the last few days, on more than one occasion, I found my mind drifting off to “a year ago today…” The contractions that woke me up one night and then faded away within a couple of hours. The movie screening we went to on October 25. The heart-shaped banana-bread ‘birthday cake’ I made for Husband in the morning. Getting my hair cut and my toes painted a year ago yesterday.

And a year ago today, just a few minutes ago, meeting my Baby for the first time.

He is my perfect baby. My miracle baby. I love him something fierce. And if I dared to ask for anything more from the universe, I would only ask that the time would not go so fast.

Happy birthday, my sweet Baby.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

October 15

Today is the National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. Today is also the day that two years ago we conceived the baby that we never got to meet. I remember that day—Husband came back from a business trip that afternoon, and I was leaving for a trip the next morning. We had one shot that month, and the fact that it worked—after months and months of ‘unexplained secondary infertility’ failures—made that pregnancy such an amazing miracle. And maybe that’s what made the loss so tough to bear. Only within the last few months I stopped thinking about that baby on a daily basis. Maybe it is the passing of time, maybe it is the new sadness that plagues me these days.

But I will always remember that baby. I will always remember how overwhelmingly happy I was to see that + sign and the afternoon I spent trying to figure out a creative way to tell Husband. I will always remember how devastatingly chilling it was to see no flicker on the gray ultrasound screen.

And while I am not a religious person, I really want to believe in life after death. I want to believe that my dad got to meet this baby and the babies he lost. And that he is there to comfort them and play with them until the rest of us get there, long, long time from now.

Friday, October 03, 2008

11 months

This past weekend Baby turned 11 months old.

A month from now, he will no longer be considered a baby. He will be 1, and he will be a toddler. This is his last non-birthday birthday, the last time we count his age in months instead of years. One, three or six months from now, we will tell people that he is 1, not 12, 14 or 17 months. The end of his babyhood is no longer a distant dot on the horizon. It is here, right in front of me, and I am overwhelmed by how fast we got here.

This realization has caused me to hold him a little longer each night before putting him in his crib, to comply more frequently with his requests to be picked up, to spend a little extra time giving him a bath, to kiss him even more, to rub the little peach-fuzzy head a little longer as he nurses. I am trying to soak it all up, to breathe him in, in an attempt to hang on to this fleeting babyhood.