5 years ago...

Do you know where you were five years ago this minute? Do you know what you were feeling? thinking? Can you feel it? See it? Smell it? I can. These are the hours that changed my life forever. This was a moment that defined me to the core. A memory that holds me in place for all of time.

There aren't many things that can hold you the way this day holds me. There aren't many memories that can capture you for a lifetime. Losing a child, that is a moment that never leaves. The moment never goes gray in your memory files. Now I am sure there are specifics that have left me in five years. There may even be some facts that have distorted, but I am pretty sure time stood still more than once that night.

I am beyond blessed that I didn't sit in that room alone. Not a member of my family went to sleep that night. Our best friends slept on hospital floors. They too were being changed forever.

I have said many, many times, but it is the moment I can't forget, the moment I most wish I had caught on a camera, so I could hold it outside of my head. It's the time that I spent with my baby boy curled in my arms and I was falling apart. There was nothing left in me, but in those moments, my baby boy held his little hand wrapped around my finger. The little fist that he almost never opened, that night held me close.

To start at the beginning of this part of our story. To tell the whole story from this hospital stay, I have to go back a few days.

December 1, we had spent until well into the wee hours of the day stringing Christmas lights, watching Christmas specials, taking pictures, never knowing this was our last night at home with our baby boy.

We had been at the hospital the week before, but we had come home and were so hopeful that things were getting back to normal. We were worried about Christmas cards and lights. We were busy with the season. We wanted baby boy to have the best first Christmas. We never thought he would never have a first Christmas.

After everyone left things took a turn so fast that looking back you question how you should have known something sooner, you should have strung less lights, worried less about how the Christmas card was going to look. There was no way to know how fleeting our moments were. Things took a turn so fast that none of our parents had even reached their homes before turning back around to our house as they received frantic calls from us.

My husband is one of the few people in this world that has actually had to save another person's life. I mean there are many of us that learn ways to save and protect others, but as a lifeguard for many years, he hadn't just taught life saving classes, he had at one point pulled a man from a pool and administered life saving CPR. Once in a lifetime that is an overwhelming task, but that night he had to administer those same life saving skills that had saved a man he didn't know, and he had to use them to save our child. His first born son was lying their needing his daddy to save his life. He stayed so calm, there was nothing calming in my nature that evening, in my mind I remember being a mess, so I don't even want to imagine what the reality of how out of it I was.

I can tell you that we did leave the house via an ambulance and that I didn't know if when we gave our son over to the paramedics if we would ever hold him alive again on this Earth. I didn't think that we would make it to the hospital. Then at the hospital, we got out of the ambulance and the paramedics still were giving him a chance. Another whirl of foggy comes over me and I remember standing outside the glass sliding doors as the woman ER doctor asked us questions and tried many things. There were SO MANY doctors and nurses surrounding our little boy that I wasn't sure if he was really even in the middle of this loud, chaotic motion that was happening in front of me.

This lady (I am sure she is an outstanding woman and doctor, I mean you would have to be to work in a Children's Hospital Emergency Room...but in that evening, she was "this lady") tells us that she is going to have to put him on a ventilator. I lose it all over again....not that I really pulled it together to lose again, but I never believed that Will's very weak bones could survive the procedure involved to put him on a ventilator. I truly believed in that moment that this doctor had just looked at me and told me that she was going to step inside this room 2 feet away from me and kill my son while I watched. That is what I heard in that moment.

She comes out...I have no idea what the actual time that passed was at that point...and gives me an update. I have NO IDEA what she said. I was in so much shock that my little boy was still alive that I heard no words that anyone spoke to me at that point.

We were eventually moved out of the ER and taken to the PICU. The exhaustion at this point makes things very patchy...maybe one day we can get Jason to write down what was actually happening, because God has gifted him with a much sharper memory of the timeline from here. I do remember learning that in the PICU only one person could sleep at a time. So if both Jason and I were going to stay with Will, which there wasn't anything that could have taken either of us out of that room, I almost had them bring me a bed pan it got so bad (I didn't change out of the clothes that had on December 1 at our house until after we made funeral arrangements late afternoon  on December 4) one of us had to stay awake. Will never slept much and with this vent in his throat that he wouldn't leave alone, there was no sleeping for him anyways, so we took turns sitting beside his bed talking to him and reading to him. Those big eyes were so very tired. They looked at me with so many questions as he was way too young to know what had just happened to him and where he was.

Within about 24 hours of being on the vent, he was breathing stronger and the vent wasn't needed. That is when the meetings started. That is when we were asked to step away from his bedside. That is when I sat in a room feeling my world yet again falling apart. We were being talked to about a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate). We were being told that once the vent came off, he wouldn't be strong enough to have it put in again. We were being told that if another spell happened like what we just had had happen we would have to say goodbye to our son. These conversations are hard to even think about and still the source of so many questions and what-if's for me and Jason, but as I have said before, I have to find peace in the fact that my God had a plan for my baby boy bigger than any decision I made sitting in a conference room with a bunch of doctors.

The vent came out. Hopes were still on the rise. We had no idea what the lasting impact of the last few days would be in his life, but we still never believed that his life was coming to an end. Maybe we were in denial, maybe we were being naïve, but we were still full of hope. I can still picture looking out our window and seeing all of our family and friends in the waiting room. I didn't want to leave my seat next to Will, but I remember the waves of support and the prayers that I saw for us through that window.

I don't remember the exact moment that we knew that we had entered the beginning of the end. I know that late on the 3rd/ early on the 4th the end had come. The looks from the hospital staff that came through our room that night were grim. Our nurse had been with us for most of the time that we had been in the PICU this trip and he was amazing. When the hours came to say goodbye, I remember him coming in and turning off all the stupid machines that beeped in our room. He said that he could monitor what he needed to in the hall and that we didn't need to be staring at a screen and having a constant beeping giving us the play-by-play of our last moments together.

Again, Will fought. Even after those machines were turned off and the family piled in the room, we were gifted hours, not minutes as the staff had prepared us for. He fought. His whole life, he fought. In the last moments, I remember Jason telling him it was okay that he didn't have to fight anymore as he stared into his daddy's eyes. I still, as his mother, yearn to be the one that felt the pain, I yearn to be the one that had to fight that fight instead of having to watch my child endure the pain. I am his mother, it is instinctual to want to protect them and make their life pain-free.

So today is the anniversary of the day that he held my hand that last time. Today is the day that I am most jealous of the angels who sit next to my son. Today is the day that I live in that hospital recliner chair in the PICU holding my little boy.

Today is the day that changed me forever.

Each day of our past molds us into who we are, and it isn't often that we are changed by sudden, sharp indentations in our soul, but on this date that is exactly what happened to me. Now I am challenged with taking that scar and the days that I have left and making the most of it for God's glory. Making my child's short time on this Earth make an impact that far exceeds the time that he was blessed with.

Snowbows and Signs

So I realized something tonight and while the date that this will actually happen is still two weeks away, the Lord has put it so heavy on my heart, there is no chance I am sleeping before I write.

As most everyone reading this knows, my sweet son Will was taken from this Earth way to early. He left this Earth two days shy of his 5 month birthday to be exact. I hate looking at pictures from the hospital, but I will share one here. This is me and my sweet baby about a day and a half before he passed. That story is not the one that I am ready to share still about those final days. Some day I will put it into beautiful words, but not today.

Today, I will share with you how my Loving God has shown me that He was with me, He is with me, and He holds my son tight every night until we are together again.

So since Will was 2 days shy of 5 months when he passed, this is a "milestone" that is hard for me to approach and handle for each of my other children. There is no cute sticker picture for this day, there is just heartache and loss.

 

When we reached this "milestone" with Evan, God sent me the most amazing "sign". He sent me a snowbow. If you have read before you know that we use snowflakes as our symbol to remember Will and rainbow baby as our symbol for Evan. For a quick why, the snowflake is fragile and only here briefly, but has such beauty in that time, the rainbow is God's peace offering as the storm is ending that He is here and with us and will provide. A Snowbow is a Rainbow in a snow storm. They are unique and unusual to say the least, but that February morning, God put one over my house as He held us a little tighter that day. This is a picture of my house with the snowbow over it taken from my neighbors window.

I am still blown away by that perfect timing of our Creator, but of course, these are all things that I have know and could have easily gone to sleep tonight without typing about tonight. What has kept me up this evening is the realization of what God has yet again done in my life.

I was thinking about how the twins were quickly approaching this "milestone" day, but I hadn't really thought about what day on the physical calendar it would fall until this evening. Ready for it???

Two days before their 5 month birthday is my 7th wedding anniversary! Pretty amazing, huh? What a cool way for God to show me that it is all going to be okay and that he has a plan for my crazy life. I am a numbers person, I love signs, and "weird" facts like this and am so floored. You can choose to tell me that I am reading into things or even believe that everything happens by chance, but I choose to believe that God is showing me that my family is perfectly built the way God wanted it to be built. What an amazing hug from Heaven. An anniversary gift from the one who brought us together and gave us these wonderful children.

Now, don't get me wrong for one second, there have been MANY moments that I have cried out to God for taking my child, for not letting me have him longer on this Earth. There is a pain that won't ever go away. There is a part of me that is bitter that I will never have all of my children together on this Earth at one time.

I mentioned earlier being a numbers person, my brain just calculates everything in statistics and assigns numbers, I know I am strange, but if your brain doesn't work that way, this will probably make no sense to you. My whole life, growing up in a family of 3 kids, I always wanted to have an even number of children. I didn't want their to be a "middle" or an odd man out. I wanted my children to be able to pair up and fight it out. I now sit here with 4 children and never for one single day in my life with these 4 children have I had an even number of children in my house to raise and care for. I went from 1 to 1 to 3....see what I mean, God likes to mess with me. That is one of the many times that he has reminded me that this is his plan and I am simply along for the ride.

I always claim to be a Type A personality who likes to have it all planned out and in order, but I have become much more laid back when it comes to the large scheme of life because my Maker has shown me countless time and countless ways that He makes the plans here. I know it is a cliché saying, but my life is proof that it is true, " If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans!"

Again, I don't know why this was so heavy on my heart to put down in words tonight, but like most things that I have gone through in my life, I may not know why I am called to go through it, but I know that it is not by mistake and it is not without direction from someone who has it all figured out.

 

 

Twins....excuse me, what did you say!?!?!

While there is still more to share of Will's time on this Earth, there is so much current craziness in our house, that I might not be as chronological as I have been going forward.

We have called Evan our Rainbow Baby for sometime now, because we were not planning on having another baby right after we lost Will, but we didn't get to make that choice. God and Big Brother Will had a conversation about what we needed in our lives and that was Evan. A Rainbow Baby is a baby that brings you God's promise of blessings from the storm. The storm isn't over, but you can start to see the light and the goodness that can come from the storm. These are the special children sent to families after the loss of a child.

I think that I spent most of Evan's pregnancy in a blur. I was after all mourning the loss of Will and on top of that being so sick barely a year after I had delivered Will again, I think that most of my memories are just void during that time.

What I didn't forget about that time was the nauseous feeling that takes over my body when I am pregnant. It is a really hard feeling to forget. It starts the day I become pregnant and doesn't leave until the baby has been evacuated from me!

People often asked in the 3 years after we had Evan, if and when we would have more children. It often depended on the day as to what my answer was to that question. I honestly didn't know how I felt and what I wanted. I did know that God had a plan and I was ready for whatever he deemed as the next adventure for my family.

I told people that I was torn. I know every child is different and parents always wonder if they have enough love to love more than one child and how additional children change the dynamic of their family, but I had had a wonderful, beautiful child who was called home to the Lord way to soon and a very special angel sent to me from Heaven to pull me out of a darkness that was unbearable. How would I just plan on another child and have just a "normal" addition to the family. We don't do normal well around here, if you haven't figured that out.

Well I was still torn, but I wasn't getting any younger and neither was Evan and I knew how much I love having siblings and so does Jason and we couldn't bare Evan not to have that experience on this Earth since he wouldn't have the opportunity to meet his brother until he is one day called home to the Lord, which we pray is a very long time away. So we decided not to necessarily "try", but to quit "not trying". It didn't take but about a month after we made this decision for God to again bless us with another positive pregnancy test.

I knew I was pregnant before I ever went and bought the test. Again, the sickness feeling is unmistakable! Jason had gone out of town for the day with his dad and I had met some friends for dinner. On the way home, I drug Evan with me into our local Walgreen's and bought the test. It turned positive much quicker than I expected since I wasn't even late yet. I couldn't even wait for Jason to get back home that night, I called him and asked if he was ready to do this all over again. For us, pregnancy is a dreaded, terrifying stream of doctors appointments where you hold your breath that someone is going to tell you that your greatest fears have come true again and you will have another child with an illness. There is no joy in the process for us.

I scheduled my doctor's appointment to confirm what I already knew. The doctor didn't let on at that time that he noticed anything of concern. Probably because he knew the above that me and Jason don't enjoy these processes and he didn't want to bring any unneeded worry to our lives.

It wasn't a few days after that appointment that I started spotting and I was feeling 10 times worse than I was even use to feeling while pregnant. I had another appointment scheduled soon, so I thought about brushing it off, but the doctor told me to come on in. I knew something was "wrong". I told Jason just to stay at work, it was so early in the pregnancy and the only thing that I could think that would be causing this much of a different feeling was to have lost the baby. So off I went to the doctor, my first OB appointment ever to go to by myself. I went in to the ultrasound room, a room I was all too familiar with as it was the same room we had first learned of Will's problems. I sat there knowing the face of the tech and that something on the screen wasn't "normal". When the doctor walked in, I just started crying and said, "I lost the baby, didn't I?" He looked at me and all but laughed at me and said, "Not quite..." In that split moment my mind was swirling, what is he even talking about...then he turned the screen to me and said, you feel like this because...well, there are two in there...you are having TWINS!!! I said, "WHAT?!?!?! You can't tell me something like that when Jason isn't here with me!!!"

I waited until I was in the car to call Jason. Still unsure how to tell him this over the phone, but sure that I wasn't going to wait until he came home. I sat in my Jetta and laughed. Called him and said, "well we have to sell my car....the Jetta isn't going to work anymore...". He was confused, much like I had been just moments ago. I let him know that I had not miscarried but in fact we were having 2 babies!! He was excited from the moment that he heard the news!

Remember I said we don't do normal well. I had struggled for many years on how to just have a "normal pregnancy" with a "planned child", and God had heard my struggles and again told me to just trust in Him. He knows what is best for me and my family and He is in control. So with that, we were yet again not going to have that "normal pregnancy" and instead of a planned child, God sent us two beautiful gifts to fill our home! Blessed times two!

To Vandy...and home!!

Where I left off last time, I had just held my baby doll for the first time. We stayed there at Baptist for another couple of days. During that time, we were presented with kind of a crossroads. There were two offers put in front of us. There was a doctor at Vandy that had a suggested treatment that was supposedly in a very new phase that he thought might bring Will some relief. The other option was to be released on Hospice care.

We put a lot of hope in what we were offered at Vandy, but those days were not what we bargained for once we got there. The doctor, once seeing Will, back tracked on all his promises. He wasn't willing to try anything. He was extremely discouraging. His partner went as far as to tell my mother and mother-in-law to essentially talk some since into me and Jason and have us pull the plug on Will and our hope. We lost all of the progress we had made at Baptist and weren't happy there at all.

My biggest frustration to this day, is that there was a doctor in this very hospital with many OI patients that were having tremendous results with a completely different treatment. I was hearing how this was so rare and there was no one that could guide me and there were no other families like us, and just a few floors away in the hospital sat those families and that doctor. It would be over two months later until I made this discovery, all without the help of any of these doom doctors.

Another reason that I hold a lot of hostility for this time and this doctor team, no lie, once I had been home with Will for a few months, I received a phone call from this doctor. He started as someone that wanted to check in, make sure that I had received my DNA results that confirmed it was Type II, but before that conversation was over, his true intentions came to light. This phone call was to see if my child was still alive. When he discovered, we were still at our home with him and he was thriving, the shock in his voice was unable for him to hide. This man who had told me to pull the plug, was in utter shock to find my child still alive and I was once again offended by this man calling me to see if my child was alive!

Once we made the decision to take him home, there was a lot more to come along than a release from the hospital. We had to learn how to work oxygen machines, how to change out feeding tubes, how to get him out of a hospital bed and travel across town...there are not new parent classes for what we encountered next.

It wasn't until that day that I learned there was such thing as a "car bed". This is a car seat where the child actually lays in a bed like seat. I also learned that day how many bumps were in the road between my house and the hospital. Jason and I drove with the flashers barely breaking 15 mph home, because I knew that one simple fender bender would be more than my child could sustain.

At our home, there was an amazing team waiting on us. The Hospice nurse, social worker, and the medical supply guy were all there ready to help us in the house and with our, "okay, what now" moment.

We put Will in the cradle that Jason's grandfather had made in our bedroom. Other than that cradle, there was a box spring, mattress, and oxygen machine. We quickly brought in a rocking chair, the one that Jason had been rocked in as a baby by his grandmother.


There were unpainted doors hung and no furniture had been purchased since our bedroom suite was destroyed in the flood. There was no pretty homecoming into this perfectly ready home for this new baby. There were two terrified parents in a half empty home scared to death about what we had just taken on. All we knew was that home meant, no visitation hours, no negative attitudes. Our child was surrounded in love and prayers by not just us but every member of our family and friends that came through that hall. We didn't know how long we would have at home, but he was there and we were ready to make memories of seeing our child in our home and outside of the beeping halls of a hospital.

There were boxes of books brought in, where we would sit and rock looking at this sweet baby boy and read every book again and again to him.

We eventually grew in courage on what we could do with him and what our life could look like even in the walls of our bedroom and our home. But those initial days, we all just adjusted and tried to catch our breath. Our baby was home. This was something so many had said wouldn't happen. We knew God had allowed us to bring him home and that there is power in being surrounded by people with faith...faith in God, in Will, in me and Jason.

This trip home wouldn't have been possible or even imaginable by us if it hadn't been for our amazing hospice team. The group of ladies that surrounded us are amazing women who I think of often. They sat with me during some of the longest days of my life. They were there for my child, but they were there for me and Jason as well. I will always hold a very special place in my heart for the people that give their lives to helping others during such dark days, and the ones that take on that tasks with families of sick children are truly angels on this Earth.

NICU Days

I think that I have put off the next blog for over four months because I don't like these next 10 days. They aren't my favorite chapter of our book by any means. These are my first 10 days as a mother, my first experiences with my son, they should be some of the happiest moments in a woman's life, but the pain of these days is still often too hard to even remember. Tonight, I will probably just take you down those first five...and I will try my hardest not to put off this whole part of the story.

The last time I wrote I was wheeling down to see my son after just learning his true prognosis. My wheelchair that looked more like a shopping cart and all my I/V's were off.

I have to admit, I don't know that I remember that first time in there exactly. I do remember that day coming in and out feeling so bad because I thought, if my son was moved to another bed, I wouldn't be able to find him. I felt a disconnect that is hard to even admit. There was no lack of love, but I wasn't allowed to hold him and it prevented me from feeling like I could even discern my child. When Evan was born and they would take him to the nursery for a quick trip for one reason or another, if he started crying, I knew it was his cry, with Will I didn't have this immediate sense of motherhood. To this day, I can't tell you if it was out of fear of losing him or lack of touch with him or a thousand other reasons, and I am very blessed that this feeling only last for a few short days, but I don't know if I will ever forget that lost feeling that I had those days.

It wasn't until much later that I also realized Jason and I did a horrible job early on conveying just how sick Will was. I think this was because the hope we had inside us was too great for anyone to think that this little life could be so temporary. Afterwards, I realized that it made some of our decisions and some of my reactions not add up for others, but in those days, I lived in a fog that was unshakeable.

Will was a beautiful baby boy with these big eyes. He was so swollen initially that the pictures are almost unbearable for me. Those days are definitely not the pictures filling the walls of my home. I did take a lot more pictures those days than I did later. I still hate that I didn't get a picture every day of his little life. I know that people think I am crazy that I took a picture of Evan everyday for the first two years, but even to this day, I just always want every moment captured to hold forever.

Those first few days, we sat at his bedside and read book after book. I had an amazing nurse who would come find me when I needed to be taken care of, always knowing where I would be. I had amazing family that would just sit in the waiting room down the hall. They knew visitation hours weren't long enough and with only two people going back at a time, many of them would rarely get the chance to come back, but they just sat keeping each other company not sure where else to be, but wanting me and Jason to know we weren't going at this alone. I would stroll through for visits, sometimes sitting while Jason would take someone back to meet our son for the first time.

I cry even tonight sitting here because newborn babies aren't supposed to have visitation hours and to only be seen two-by-two and they sure aren't supposed to sit in a bed unheld by their own mother.

I was discharged from the hospital 5 days after he was born. It was all insurance would let me stay. I had just had a C-section, so no one would let me stay in the little make shift NICU sleep rooms, so Jason had to drive me out of that hospital and to our hollow home. It was hollow for many reasons that night...no mother should EVER have to drive away from the hospital without her newborn baby. Add that the fear of not knowing if your child would be alive when you returned and the fact that you, as his mother, still hadn't even held him in your arms....I sat that night in the floor of our kitchen and whaled a cry like I had never cried. I can honestly say, I cried harder that night, so unsure of everything than I did the night that Will left this Earth in my arms. The night he left this Earth, he was in my arms where he was supposed to be and the Lord was taking him for me to keep after. I had time to be his mommy and to yell it out with God, but that night laying in my kitchen, I hadn't had any of those moments yet and I didn't know if I could survive if I never had those moments.

I raced to the hospital as visitation hours opened that next morning. I had a cooler full of milk for my child and an ache to be with him that was all consuming. Jason told the nurse that day that I had left the hospital and had yet to hold my child and she whipped around and said that wasn't acceptable and she closed this little curtain around us and let me take my son into my arms. It was such a beautiful moment.

Now I know some of you are reading asking why wouldn't they "let" you hold him, and in all fairness, I think they would have let me do as I please to some degree, but they were as scared to death of his disease as I was and no one was suggesting it. I guess because of fear that we would bring him more pain by causing him more breaks, Jason and I hadn't brought up holding him and with the amount of wires and tubes, we couldn't even really be sure how we planned on getting him up and out of his bed. I think to later visits to the PICU when I would have beat a nurse if she laid a hand on him without my help or without me being present and the stark contrast between those days and these early days. He felt like he belonged more to the hospital and nurses at that point than he did to me. Holding him that day helped to start our bond and show me how to be the mother that I was supposed to be, because there was no parenting book or what to expect book that could have guided me. It all had to be done by the heart.

Thankfully the Lord guides us and gives us strength more than we can ever expect possible. Its so true that you stand stronger in your weakest moments, because for once in our hard-headed lives it isn't our strength that we are standing on. It is those moments when all of our strength comes from the Lord that we are at our strongest and can truly move mountains. I don't know why God chose me a Jason to be two of his warriors that had to be completely taken out at the knees...more than once....to stand, but He did and if nothing more, we are proof that it is possible to make it...I don't say make it "through" because we will never be "through" this chapter of our lives, this is a piece to our puzzle that will forever be there and we will always have to rely on the Lord for the strength to remember that this is not the end and there is a greater purpose to this all.

Until next time....and yes even though this tore my heart out to put down in words tonight...I promise I won't wait 4 months to write again...but come on it took me 4 years to get this far, so you got to bear with me...thank you all for taking the time out of your own crazy lives to share in our lives. Many of you were there these days, and I know you felt these pains with us...wish there was a word that meant more than just thank you. We love you all.

At the hospital

Well I am at the hospital, water has broke, C-section baby is trying to come out without a single cut...it's like a movie that you just get rushed right back to a room, right? Nope. We sit their in admitting, it was midnight, she wasn't really busy. My parents walk in, they live a lot further from the hospital than we do, so I don't even want to know how they were driving. The admitting lady is sitting there telling me that I can't go back until they have my information and since I didn't pre-register they will need everything. Water is still coming out, labor pains are getting closer together, at this point I am envisioning delivery in the waiting room. I am trying to convince the lady that this is an emergency, she is giving me that look that says "honey, every lady thinks her delivery is an 'emergency'". I get very frank with her that between my mom and my husband, I am going to give her one of them, she is going to give me the other one and they are both fully capable of filling out my information, but someone needed to push me down the hall....IMMEDIATELY!!!! She receives a call on a phone not directly in front of me, but more behind her. She is very quiet on this call. She turns back to me after the call like she has seen a ghost and all of a sudden no paperwork was as important as moving me on down the hall. I don't know who or what was said on that call, but I imagine someone told her that I wasn't being an overly dramatic mother and the thought of what this delivery might entail happening on her desk wasn't something she wanted any part of.  The doors fly open to the labor and delivery wing to a nurse holding a little piece of paper they use to test to see if it is really your water that broke. She gets one look at me and laughs, saying, "that would be a waste of my paper!"

Somehow I move from the chair to a bed and before my drug man, aka my father-in-law is there to hook me up with the good stuff, the nurse confirms that I am over 8 centimeters dilated. Once the drugs were in and I felt safe for the first time since my water had broke, things get really foggy.

My doctor made it there, we made it to the room for the C-section (another one of my spoilers...the smell when they perform a C-section makes the dentist office during filling day smell right darn pleasant).

The next vivid memory is the sound of my baby boy's first cry. It was the most amazing thing I had ever heard!!! It was our first MAJOR milestone! We were told he might not be born alive, he might not have enough oxygen to survive, we didn't know that we would ever hear him cry!!! I thought immediately, they were so wrong about it all! My baby boy is here and he is fine...just listen. When he was handed to me to see, it was very brief and he was very swaddled, all I could see were those big eyes and my heart just leapt in ways I never knew it could.

The NICU team quickly took him with them and Jason followed not letting our miracle out of his sight. What happened next on that journey of father and son was a story that I didn't know until after Will had passed away. The burden that Jason carried for those next few hours alone is still hard for me to even think of. He was there for the initial X-Rays, he knew of the 70+ breaks, he knew that the diagnosis was wrong, but a whole new prognosis was given and it wasn't anything to be joyous about. Still he took that news, came out of that room, met up with me in my recovery room (along with lots of our family that had been anxiously waiting to see us)he kissed me and told me how he got to see our little guy.

I was taken up to another room and since this had all happened in the middle of the night, I found myself falling asleep. The family left to let me get my rest and Jason and I drifted off from pure exhaustion. His grandfather came first thing that morning, before any other family had returned and was with us when the Neonatologist came to talk to me for the first time. I don't remember his words exactly, I don't know that I was even able to absorb most of what was being said to me. I was falling apart and my world was crashing all over again. This is the first time I heard of Osteogenesis Imperfecta. A disease this doctor hadn't seen and was reading up on in the hours after Will's birth. There are multiple types of this disease and there is no perfect system, without DNA testing to know where your type falls, but all signs pointed towards Will having the most severe form of this disease...These words were so hard for me to comprehend at these hours. I immediately tried to sit up, not recommended that shortly after a C-section, but I didn't care what it took, I was getting to my son, I was going to be with him, I didn't know if I had minutes, hours, days, but I had to be with him.

It's time!!!!

Well I wasn't kidding about the fog that I lived in from May until July....I have tried for weeks to pinpoint some stories from those days, and there just aren't many....I can tell you we went to a lot of doctors appointments and had a lot of amazing people working around the clock in our home. The days were very busy and we were all in a rush to a time that we still didn't know what it held. Our rush to get ready was cut short when the little man who was breach and small and not expected to come on his own decided that he was ready to meet the world.

The first of July we received our kitchen cabinets. Very exciting for a 9 month pregnant woman to have a kitchen again. We had one more doctor appointment with a doctor that we didn't want to see, but we had to have approval to deliver at the hospital we wanted to have him at and not the "teaching hospital". We wanted him to be born where we had been born, where his grandfather worked, where the rooms were familiar and the staff was family. We just had to get the NICU doctors and the specialist on board. Well they signed off on Thursday. So we were to go and start pre-registration the next week after the holiday...we still had two weeks until our due date of course so we were doing fine with time....right???? well if you have learned anything about us it is that things don't really go on our plan....EVER.

Well the holiday weekend was wonderful. I LOVE fireworks, so I drug everyone downtown to watch them, because it is tradition and I couldn't skip this year! I spent most of the weekend crawling around in my kitchen putting up all my pots and pans (nesting much.....). Monday comes around and we are all still off for the holiday, but softball for Jason doesn't take off for the holiday, so he went on...why wouldn't he, right? My dearest, best friend came over and we chowed down on a casserole that a friend from work had made, we laughed and watched a movie....all was well in the world. I mean the pain in my back wasn't anything....right??? Well I didn't think two thoughts about it and it sure never crossed my mind that this is what labor pains felt like. My friend wasn't quite as confident in that as I was, especially when she realized that these pains weren't constant pain, but more of a regular pain that you could time between.....I put back labor pains on the list of things that no one really tells you about before you have a baby....in true best friend nature, she wouldn't leave until Jason came home from softball, even though I told her that I was fine and she should go on.

Jason's dad came back after softball and still I went on about my bad self that I was just fine. They finished up whatever they were working on that evening in the bathroom...still didn't have a full working bathroom downstairs...but we had two weeks until my C-section and then I would be in the hospital for a few days, so there was plenty of time to have a working restroom for me when I would come home....yeah, you get the idea. We thought we had the schedule all figured out.

Jason and I go to lay down and I am still feeling like crap. I lay in the bed and decide that was never going to happen. I moved to the recliner and yelled for Jason that I needed a heating pad to make my back feel better. I don't think that a full two minutes passed between Jason getting me set up with the heating pad in the recliner and making it back to bed before I was screaming for him again and this time it was full panic screaming!

I was GUSHING "water"....I yell that MY WATER HAS BROKE!!!! He comes in there and says "are you sure?" Well, I will give you that I have never had my water break before, but as for what else this could be, I was all out of options. I look at him and scream, well I've never used the restroom out of there before if it isn't.....now let me give you some TMI.....another moment that I felt no one even began to prepare me for....this "water" breaking event is not as I had ever imagined. 1. if your child is breach, be prepared that there be more to the "water" than liquid substances, 2. it doesn't always just come out and stop (yep, I jumped in the shower thinking that I could clean this mess off of me before I got in the car, that wasn't going to happen, because the water wouldn't stop!), 3. labor pains are SO MUCH WORSE once your water breaks!!!! That is all of my spoilers for today, but if you haven't birthed a child and you do go into labor and your water breaks, you can thank me later.

My mom is yelling on the phone to get in the car, Jason's dad is telling Jason that he doesn't have to have a bag packed just get me in the car, Jason is taking every towel that he can find to wrap me like a sumo wrestler and get me into the car. Once in the car, we realize we've never even discussed how we wanted to get to the hospital from our house, I'm screaming, he was going too fast, too slow, too bumpy, pretty much you name it and I yelled it.....we arrive at the hospital.....and that is where I will start next time :)