Alden had shots on Tuesday. Poor girl! 4 shots and the flu shot. But thank goodness she doesn’t need anymore until she’s one. She is 17.14 lbs and 27.25 inches long. She hasn’t really grown or gained weight too much since her last appt. The doctor said we are at a good age to try and start sleep training her.

The next night I decided I would give it a try. She cried for an hour when I laid her down. I obviously went in to comfort her at timed intervals, but I dunno. I just couldn’t do it. With Landon, I stuck it out and made sure it worked. I put in the effort, listened to him cry for countless nights, over and over…I heard her crying and it broke my heart into a million pieces.

I don’t WANT to sleep train her. I WANT to rock her and cuddle her every night until she’s asleep. I love her smell, and the feeling of her warm little body against mine; my heart beats so hard when I hold her because I just have so much love for her. Sure, it’s hard at 1,3,5, a.m. But, I love her and I wasn’t planning on another baby so it’s hard for me to force myself to sleep train her just because I’m having a new baby.

No, I don’t think I can rock her and rock the baby and get proper sleep. But, I just don’t think I’m ready yet. Maybe I’ll try again in a few weeks…my momma heart broke and I couldn’t do it.

Today, I had an MFM appt. I’m 14+5 and baby looked great. She was moving and dancing all over. I had some repeat blood work done and all looked well. Our next appt is set for 10/26 and it will be the detailed anatomy scan. ALREADY. I can’t believe it. I think I’m still in shock if that’s even possible.

Tomorrow we’re going to walk a piece of property we’ve been looking at. Hopefully we like it, and we can move forward with getting our house ready to sell/building a new home. It’s so hard to make a decision on something like this. If we build it’s going to be our forever home so we need to make sure we’re in love with the land.

The other night I was holding Alden while rocking her and I looked at her sweet head and thought “I can’t imagine my life without you”. I now can’t imagine life without Alden, and on the flip side I don’t allow myself to think about life with Kenley. I can’t let my brain go there. I don’t know that I could handle the sadness and desire that would come if I did.

It’s an odd feeling…it’s a feeling of guilt, and sadness, and joy. I want both of my girls here. I don’t want to have to live without either of them.

Mom guilt is a very real and strong thing. Parenting after loss is incredibly difficult.

Today Alden had her 6 month check up. She is 17.14 lbs and 27.25 inches tall! She had to get 4 shots and one drinkable shot. My poor girl…I hate seeing her in pain and the shots seemed to take forever this time.

She fell asleep on the drive home and she’s been napping ever since. I know it has to hurt terribly getting four shots in our legs at one time.

In other news, she is sitting up by herself (for a while now) and she’s starting to try to crawl. Watching her up on her hands and knees is hilarious but I’m always scared she’s going to smack her face on a toy, or the floor if she falls. She loved to put ALL things in her mouth, especially her toes. She’s so much fun. I’m just waiting for her to start mocking us and saying things but mostly we just get blowing raspberries or loud screams.

It’s very hard for me to believe that in a few short months I will have another baby. Today at the peds office the receptionist tried to schedule Alden’s 9 month appointment on Kenley’s 2nd birthday. I was just taken by surprise and off guard by it. I said no of course and we scheduled for another day. It was weird how off my guard I was. I guess maybe I just didn’t expect to be taken by surprise at her appt. I don’t know.

I had to hold back the tears. Here I am setting up a 9 month appt when I should be setting up a 2 year well check. But that won’t ever happen, at least for Kenley.

So weird.

I will never understand why I lost my daughter but other people get to keep theirs.

I was talking to a friend last night about the “old us” (before our babies died), and we both agreed that we are no longer those people anymore. I’m still the same shell of a human, yes, but I’m not the same person I was on 12.28.15 vs. 12.29.15….

When I heard my daughter was dead, I died as well. My soul would never to be the same again, my heart would be forever broken, and relationships would be forever changed, irreparable. I felt my entire world change along with those awful words. I would never be able to talk to another mother who hasn’t lost her child and feel “normal” again. In the early days I noticed that people would carefully choose their words when talking to me, but now that Alden is here and we are expecting again it seems that isn’t the case so much anymore.

I’m not asking to be handled with special gloves, but this is my life now and if I don’t seem to be interested in your pregnancy issues, or the fact that your living children are doing X,Y, or Z, please forgive me. There is about one non loss friend that is pregnant currently and I can talk to her about her pregnancy because she has been there for me, she never pushes me to feel a certain way or do a certain thing. She understands my pain, and she checks in on me very often. She brought us food after Kenley died, she came to visit Alden in the hospital. Pretty much all other pregnancy related conversation is just not fun for me.

I’m not a normal pregnant woman anymore. After my first miscarriage I was devastated. After my second I felt defeated. After Kenley died, it all changed. Looking at old photos just reminds me that I was 100% happy at one point in my life, and that on the flip side, I will never be 100% happy again in my entire life. My daughter will always be missing from our life. I’ve also been feeling guilty because when Shane lost Kenley, he lost me too. I don’t want to be this sad; I would much rather NOT be sad and have my Daughter here but that is not going to happen.

People say “it gets easier” or “time heals all wounds”, and to that I say how does it get easier? Please tell me how it’s EVER going to get easier? It’s very simple actually; it’s like a math equation.

me + kenley = happy

me- kenley= not happy

So….seeing as Kenley will never be here again, in the form I need her to be, I will never be fully happy again.

I think people don’t truly understand. Every year, I will hang an ornament on my Christmas tree to remember my Daughter, but I will watch my other children open their gifts. Every year, I will hang her stocking next to all the others, but it will always be empty.

Every year.

Forever.

Her Birthday. Thanksgiving. Christmas. The 4th of July. Everything.

Every should be Christmas program. 7th grade dance. Homecoming. Prom. Everything.

I will never be the woman I was before she died and I have accepted that. I don’t want to be her, because that means I don’t get to know my Daughter.

This morning as I’m sitting here, drinking my coffee watching the weather channel with no children here…I wonder how much one person is supposed to be able to handle. Because I’m pretty sure that I’m well past that threshold.

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This is how last night went in our house…

6:15 p.m. bedtime (only because I literally could not keep her awake any longer)

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I’ve always been an emotional person; things would always choke me up, or bring me to tears pretty easily. After Kenley died, as I’m sure you can imagine, it’s been about 100x worse. Whatever. It is what it is. I just let the tears flow now whenever I need to. The worst culprit (maybe always?) has been greeting cards. Birthday, Father’s day, Wedding, Sympathy it doesn’t matter. I dread the Holidays for a number of reasons but buying greeting cards pretty much takes the cake.

This week is my little sister’s birthday, and Shane’s birthday. I’m thoroughly looking forward to sobbing like a lunatic in the card aisle of Target or wherever I decide to go.

I’ve been feeling super emotional lately about Kenley’s death. I don’t know if it’s the change in seasons (my guess is yes) or the fact that we’re trying to put our house on the market, or WHAT, but damn. I think I’m just starting to feel so far away from her. Last year during the fall it was my first fall without her…I wondered if she would enjoy crushing the leaves in her little fists, or if she would like to be outside. This year is different. It’s gotten cold pretty early (or has it? I guess it is September already…where has time gone???) and Alden enjoys being outside. She loves to look at the leaves and to grab them whenever we let her. So…it’s very bittersweet. I know that Kenley would have loved these things, and now I get to enjoy Alden doing them. Talk about fucked up.

Alden loves the outdoors; if I put her in her exersaucer outside she just jabbers and coos. It’s sweet, and funny, and beautiful, and yet it’s painful for my momma heart. It’s so unfair that this is how I will always feel- happy with a twinge of sadness. Some days are better than others, and some days are far worse. I am pretty much expecting this Holiday season to be a mine field. I won’t know what will upset me, or what will make me miss my first Daughter. With Alden here, things are softer and harder all at the same time. I know it doesn’t make sense, and honestly I don’t expect anyone to understand what I mean.

I look at her and I can’t believe she is mine. I can’t believe that I got to hand pick her, and now I get to keep her and raise her. I rock her at night, and cry tears onto her perfect little head, all while feeling guilt that I should be happy not sad…but I am happy and not sad, but I’m also a little sad…It’s just so hard.

When she wakes up from a nap and squeals and jabbers until I go pick her up, my heart just explodes with love. And somewhere deep down inside of me though…I’m sad that she’s not my first baby girl. I would never wish Alden was anyone except who she is, and I know that it might sound that way, but it’s just the only way I can describe it.

I love both of my girls, and I want both of them to be here so badly.

Life after loss is so messy, and I’m just really really struggling to keep it clean.

You know when it feels like a perfect storm and everything just crashes and burns all on the same day.

That day was today.

I’m exhausted to start the day off anyway because I’m in the thick of first trimester sickness. Alden is teething so she pretty much does not want to be put down all day. We found out that the furnace issue could be fixed for $2800 (!!!) instead of $6,000 but today, we found out that we actually need to pay $4800 instead. Not fun.

Shane and I have decided that we would like to list our house, and buy land to build our dream home. With this baby on the way, we need another bedroom. We have a few pieces of land in mind that we love so we did some digging into who owned them. I called the front runner’s owner about 3 months ago, and he didn’t seem interested in selling at the time and we weren’t 100% sure we wanted to build at that time either.  So today, I decided I would call him back.

He is an 88 year old farmer. He owns a ton of land in our town, and his home sits on 91 acres of farm land. The piece of land that we are interested in is part of an agriculture plot, but it’s only 6 acres out of the 20 that is parceled off on the auditors website. I called and told him that we had spoken a few months ago and reintroduced myself. I asked if he was interested in hearing an offer from us to which he replied ” I don’t think that I’m interested in selling”. My heart sank. This land that we are interested in is not only a really cool place to build a house, it’s the place that I took Kenley’s “gender reveal” announcement photo. I want that to be a part of my home forever.

He told me about 3 more times that he didn’t want to sell, but I made sure to throw a number at him (mostly because he did ask what we were considering price wise), and told him that we have children, and how much we would love to build a modern farm house up on the land.

I’m going to give him a week to think it over (although, he probably has literally forgotten about our conversation because he needs zero money) and then I think I will call him back. He doesn’t seem to have…feelings? I don’t want to sound rude, but I think he just doesn’t care about my life story, or anything that I say. I’m going to try one more time, I think. I’m going to approach it like we found other land, but I would rather have his. I’m not upping my offer because honestly it is a lot of money, and it’s going to cut into our home budget a lot. I have so many different feelings about it. I thought he might do this, and not agree to sell us the land.

I don’t want to bring up Kenley’s photo because technically I was trespassing on his property, but it makes me wonder if I did mention it if it would tug at his heart strings. I don’t know. I highly doubt it, and it makes me feel like I’m exploiting her. Ugh.

So after he shot me down, we called the second farmer…who also shot me down. He was a lot nicer than the other farmer though, so there’s that….

My grief was also really bad today…I don’t even need to elaborate on that because it’s just the same grief, different day. Some days I just can’t.

I just miss Kenley so so much, and I wish I had all my babies here with me to cuddle.

Yesterday we had our first MFM appointment. It consisted of an Ultrasound, meeting with the doctor who delivered Alden, then finally we rounded out the appointment with lab work.

Our ultrasound looked great; little babe was just hanging out in there. Toward the end of the scan, baby started to move and we were able to get a few good photos where you can actually see the baby’s arms and legs.

I am still very much in shock that this is our life again, but seeing baby dancing around in there helped to hammer home the fact I think. They said everything looked good, and that we were measuring right on track. They said our due date was 3.23.18, with delivery at 37 weeks that will put our due date around 3.2.18.

When we met with the doctor, we also got to see a lot of the nurses who helped us during Alden’s pregnancy and they were so happy for us. I loved the nursing staff there, and I could never say enough nice things about them. When Dr. Frey came in we talked about my history and she used Kenley’s name when talking to me. I loved that so much. I remember crying to her many many many times about how sad I was, and how I NEEDED Alden to survive. She is the greatest Dr and I am so thankful she puts up with my crazy.

She agreed to pretty much mimic Alden’s pregnancy plan. Ultrasounds as normal, early monitoring for preeclampsia, and gestational diabetes, level 2 anatomy scan, bi-weekly NST’s starting at 32 weeks, lovenox injections daily for the duration of the pregnancy, and delivery at 37 weeks.

She sent me to the lab and I had 11 vials of blood drawn…Yuck. We did a bunch of standard testing, a1c, and the genetic testing which will also tell us the sex of the baby. A lot of the results have come back already, and they are all normal! I didn’t expect anything to be wrong, but…you just never know. So hopefully next week sometime (maybe…depending because Labor day is a holiday so we may not hear till the following Monday) we will know if the baby is genetically normal, and also the sex of the baby.

Tomorrow we are 11 weeks.

My mind is just blown still.

I hope I can handle this again.