Pouting

Well now I am feeling capital L Loser-y, because only 4 people (and I love you 4) are interested in my giveaway (or they are willing to fake interest out of pity.) Seriously, I have very low self esteem these days and any form of rejection makes me freak out. Is this any more appealing? (I thought it turned out pretty well.)


This one is for my mom. My parents' house used to be bright yellow so I associate that colour with my mom. (They are also moving out of that house this summer after 34 years in it.)

A Quote

From Resilience by Elizabeth Edwards:

"If I had lost a leg, I would tell them, instead of a boy, no one would ever ask me if I was 'over' it. They would ask me how I was doing learning to walk without my leg. I was learning to walk and to breath and to live without Wade. And what I was learning is that it was never going to be the life I had before."

(Thanks to Brooke for reviewing this book and giving me a push towards reading it for myself.)

Craft = Crutch = Giveaway

I signed up for the Mother's Day Bouquet swap, organized by the lovely Jenni. And just like the Christmas swap, when I couldn't stop with just one ornament, I am addicted again. (I think I made 7 ornaments and I bought paper to make many more in 2011.) I've already made 2 of these and started 2 more and I think there will be a few more yet.

The bouquet swap has a flower theme, but I don't trust Canada Post to not destroy a delicate parcel so I need a durable kind of project. Also my artistic skills are limited to cutting and gluing paper (as shown by the ornaments), picking colours and arranging things (honed by years of home decorating) so that further limited my options. After searching craft blogs (I wish my "me time" revolved around crafts and not grieving, there are so many cool crafts out there), I came up with a plan and here is what I sent out for the swap:


The frogs are a special reminder for the mom it went to, I hope she loves it. I liked doing it, so I did another one:


I think it will go to my grandmother, she loves teal blue and it will take care of her Mother's Day gift without me going shopping. I'm going to do a yellow one next and then another green one and I'd like to try a different blue too.

But what does this have to do with all of you? Well, in honour of Mother's Day and my 1st blogoversary (which was Sunday), I want to make one of these frames for (at least) one of my wonderful readers. I would make one for all of you, but the shipping would bankrupt me as I have no personal income right now. (D.G. graciously funds all my crafting projects.) All you need to do to win this giveaway is leave me a comment (singing the praises of my floral creations, of course) and let me know what colour you would like your frame to be (green, teal, blue or yellow). If you are in the UK, I know Mother's Day was a month ago, so it will just be really early for next year. If you are in Australia, it's just gonna be late for this year. (Heck it might be late for a North American reader, but I'll do my best.) The cut off for giveaway is Friday at midnight so that should give all my readers a chance to comment.

And just because I want to continue bragging up my (limited) crafting skills, here is a picture of the yoga bag I sewed last weekend. I love the fabric. (For any babywearers out there, yes, I love it because it reminds me of a Didy Ellipsen.)

Trying to be positive for a few minutes

The snow here has finally almost completely melted. (There are shady spots where the snow will still last a few more days but they are easy to ignore.) This weekend we noticed that a little bit of spring had finally come to our yard.



The tulips seem to have survived the late snow, hopefully they will bloom in time for Mother's Day.

Survived Easter weekend, but only just barely. D.G. had today off (yes he has a union job) so it was still Easter weekend for us. I did however get a break in the middle of the weekend, when D.G. took D on a day trip to his aunt and uncle's farm to see his sister. I had almost 12 hours completely to myself which hasn't happened in probably the last 4 years. (D.G. has never taken D further away than to the swimming pool for a couple hours on his own.) I watched TV non-stop, ate junk food and even finally sewed myself a new yoga mat bag. Being by myself is just so peaceful, and being alone without a giant to do list is even better. Of course all that peacefulness was wrecked by the arrival of AF Saturday evening. (And now I should ovulate right on Mother's Day when I will no doubt be sexy as hell with my puffy red eyes and snotty nose.)

D.G. and I finished off the weekend tonight with a long, upsetting, emotional and ultimately pointless discussion, although we did avoid an outright fight. The only thing that was accomplished was that I feel more isolated and loser-y than I did this afternoon when I was feeling sad and lonely but could still stop myself from outright crying in public. (Yes, loser-y is a word, I've been using it since 1998.)

Let it be over soon

I just want Easter over with. I'm sick of seeing all the plastic bunnies and pastel baskets, it just makes me angry. All of it, the secular and the religious, just makes me mad. My baby died last Easter and for some reason this holiday is making me feel much worse than the actual anniversary of his death. Maybe it's because most people don't have a clue that I am seething with anger inside right now. I want nothing to do with Easter and unlike Christmas, I'm not even making an effort for D's sake. I am just barely tolerating the things that our families do (which is mostly sending parcels due to the distance) but I wish I could just banish it all from my life.

You know things are bad when...

...you are almost grateful that your water heater is leaking.

Today was a disaster. I would tell you the whole awful drawn out story, except my arm hurts too much to type properly. (Merry's hot water bottle is getting a thorough test run tonight.) To sum things up:

- Our water heater started leaking some time last night.
- I had to make 3 trips to the hardware store before I got the damn thing fixed.
- I spent close to 2 hours today standing in cold water.
- My arm is super sore from a combination of using a pipe wrench and wringing out wet towels.
- I was surrounded by perfect looking mommy clones all pushing babies in strollers at D's first dance class today. (The water heater gave me an excuse to get away from the clones.)
- I had to listen to my daughter say to one of hew new friends, "My baby died, did your babies die?" for the first time. (I know the mom of this little girl so no adults freaked out at this question.)
- I was close to tears for most of the day which made me too tired to do much more than be a lump at yoga class.

Small bright spots:
-Our next door neighbor is amazing and saved me from dragging D to the hardware store on trips 2 and 3.
- I did fix the leak without calling a plumber, (go me!) and nothing important got destroyed.

So tired, must sleep now.

I've created a monster

I received some wonderful gifts for Reid's birthday. However, I will only subject you to my amateur photographic efforts for two of them because while they brought me so much comfort they also had an unexpected side effect.

Lareina gave me a sculpture from Midnight Orange.



I bought myself a present, one of Merry's dragons. (Merry also sent me a gift, but the hot water bottle and cover are not nearly as cute and they arrived together so really it was one big box of gifts.) Gaffer is as cute in person as he is in pictures, but since you are not here, you'll have to settle for a picture:


Now both these presents arrived swaddled in bubble wrap so that they could survive international shipping. When I unwrapped them, I made the mistake of leaving the bubble wrap on the kitchen counter. And what do you do with bubble wrap when you are a kid (or a daddy)? You pop it, of course. And now I have addict on my hands:


D will literally sit there popping bubble wrap for 15 minutes at a time. She will turn down offers to do her favorite activities, reading a story and playing ponies, in favour of popping bubbles. I had hoped to save some of the extra wrap for mailing my own parcels but it looks like it will all be sacrificed to the popping monster.

Extra crazy

My eyes are sore from too much screen time tonight*, but I need to vent so here I am at 10:30, still up while the rest of the family sleeps.

D.G. and I are going through a rough patch. It seems like everyday that he doesn't work we end up arguing and/or fighting by noon. We also seem unable to avoid having these arguments in front of D which makes me feel horribly guilty on top of the crappy feelings from fighting with D.G. There's no one thing causing the problems (although D.G. would probably say that it all comes back to me being a mess) so it's not like we can just avoid one thing and avoid the conflict. I am sick of being upset but I just can't hold back when he does or says something that bothers me. Maybe it's the depression combined with PMS that's pushing me over the edge constantly (isn't that a great combination?) or maybe I'm just more nuts now because it's April and I'm trapped in the days between April 3rd and Easter and it keeps f-ing snowing.

*I was "working" not slacking off playing Soli.tare. The Faces of Loss site has moved to Word.Press and there are these random spaces that keep showing up in my blogroll that won't go away no matter what I do. Grrr.

Well, something sure is frozen over

No kidding, this is what it is like here right now. (Yes that's snow on that wind shield.) We are under a snowfall warning. The tulips that were finally starting to poke out of the ground are buried. Hopefully they are not frozen because the bulbs came from the Walk to Remember last fall and I was really looking forward to them blooming sometime around Reid's birthday. Right now we will be lucky if they bloom before the end of the month.

Spring cleaning begins

D.G. and I started clearing stuff out of our basement this weekend. It is spring technically and I thought there was some magic way to rearrange the furniture that would give us more useful space. It turns out that we can only have a slightly less awkward arrangement at best but it's still an improvement. Our basement is currently filled with a mixture of furniture that has been deemed too ugly to be upstairs, various boxes of junk we have collected, all of D's toys that are too big, too noisy or too annoying to be in the living and all the baby things that I thought I would be able to get rid of by now. We decided to get rid of a few pieces of furniture (thank you Fre.scycle) and move some of the baby things into the closet of the "baby room" upstairs (really, there's no reason not to fill up the closet with the bassinet and car seat, not like we will be using any of it any time soon, if ever) and rearrange the rest. We still have to go through all the boxes of junk but we will see when that happens. For now I have a sewing area and D has a few more square feet of space to fill up with toys. Of course I again had to face the fact that it's been over a year and I still have no idea when or if I'll ever get to use all those baby things again. Sometimes, I just wonder if I should sell it all and then the spite gods would make sure I got pregnant because it would so damn inconvenient to have to collect it all again.

Runaway Baby

We recently took The Runway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown out of the library for D. We have been reading Goodnight Moon to D since she was born so I thought we should read her the other classic M.W.B. book. I know some people think The Runaway Bunny is creepy because the mother bunny won't let her son have any freedom (I believe one blog I read referred to the mommy bunny as a stalker mom) but it makes me sad for all the obvious dead baby reasons. I read it and think, "Why didn't I get the chance to convince my son that he should just stay with me?" I can make ridiculous promises/threats about what I will do to stay near my child. What if I had the chance to tell Reid how much I wanted him to stay with me? ( I mean telling him while he was alive and in my arms, not sobbing it out to an empty room after he died) Would I feel "better" if I felt like I got to try to keep him here instead of him slipping away before he was even born?

Using pretty pictures to distract you from the lack of content

My brain is still to lethargic to create coherent thoughts and now my arm is too sore to type properly too. (I finally got in for the touch ups on my tattoo. Must have thought something would go wrong or I would have canceled the touch up appointment the day after the BFP.) I am still here though so I'll dazzle you with some photos I took at the conservatory last Sunday. There was a whole area dedicated to daffodils and tulips for spring and I had never seen so many varieties of daffodils before. We tend to just plant one-tone yellow or yellow and white daffodils here in the great white north. These were all so pretty and of course made me think of Freddie and Merry.

Inertia

I have taken way too many physics classes in my life, one of the dangers of becoming an engineer. (Although it does allow to me get all the science jokes on BigB.angTh.eory which D.G. and I love and never features babies because most nerds can barely speak to girls, let alone get close to a girl enough to get one pregnant.) I understand that once a body comes to rest, it takes force to get it moving again. Well, I have definitely come to rest. I don't want to do anything, deal with anything, think about anything. I would be perfectly content to just take up residence in my bedroom with my laptop and the TV for company. Forget about working out 4 times a week they way I was before the fake pregnancy. Forget about trying to reach out to people who I haven't been able to talk to for the last 6 months. (Good thing I got my haircut and went to the dentist before I lost all forward momentum because they were necessary even if I was miserable during both of them.) I don't want to put away the luminaries we made for Reid's birthday. I don't want to look at the cards we did receive or think about the ones we didn't get. Ugh, I don't even want to think about how much force it's going to take to get me moving again.

Now it's a pity party (and I've run out of cupcakes)

I'm not just tired anymore. There is a serious amount of feeling sorry for myself going on. Not so much about Reid not being here, mostly about not be able to get pregnant. (well pregnant with a viable pregnancy if you want to get technical). A couple from my support group whose daughter died 10 days before Reid are being induced tomorrow. Their plan for trying again was to just wait and see what happens. I mean it's great for them, but it hurts to watch.

I now know there is a kind of waiting that is crappier than the normal 2ww, waiting for your cycle to restart after a blighted ovum, miscarriage or other false start. I have no idea when things will happen but I was told there is no reason to wait to try again so I am going nuts waiting for some sign from my body. I am determined to not miss whatever tiny window might be open.

---

While I am bitching and moaning, I might as well get some other stuff out of my head too. We were surprised and touched by thoughtful gestures from family and friends over the last week (will post about that when I am feeling more positive) but right now it's the people who didn't do or say anything about Reid's first anniversary who are on my mind. We didn't here anything, not anything at all, from any member of D.G.'s family. Not his mom, not either of his sisters, not his dad. I know Hallmark doesn't make a card for this occasion but really wouldn't you think that you should say something to your son/brother around the time that his child should have his first birthday? Urgh, it is getting harder by the day to tell myself that I should make an effort to have a real relationship with these people for D.G. and D's sakes.

Tired

I have so many things to post, but I am just exhausted. The closest thing to describing how I feel is hungover. Too many cupcakes, too many emotions and not enough sleep have left me wishing I could have stayed in bed all day. (not an option with D though)

Everything that we could control yesterday went as well as we could have hoped and as everyone says when the anniversary is over, the anticipation is worse than the actual event. Too bad knowing that doesn't help make the lead up any easier.

Reid's First Birthday

Preparations for the birthday celebration started on Saturday afternoon when we decorated luminaries. I admit I did most of the them but D and D.G. both helped too. We lit them just before D went to bed so she could see them all lit up and we kept them burning until just after the time of Reid's delivery 1 year ago. It was very hard watching the clock move toward 1:24 am, but it felt right to be awake for that time.


We woke up at the usual time, re-lit 2 of the luminaries and as promised, ate chocolate cupcakes for breakfast. D sang Happy Birthday to Reid all by herself and it was so sweet, I barely held it together.


We spent most of the morning doing random things around the house and then got dressed and went for lunch at the conservatory in the city. Right now indoors is the only place where you can find live flowers around here but luckily for us it wasn't too busy. We took many pictures of the amazing plants and flowers and D enjoyed being able to run around without a jacket and mittens on.


We came home and had a little rest, then went back outside to enjoy the sunshine. We released 3 balloons from our very snowy backyard and watched them until they disappeared into the sky.

For Reid, our little boy and baby brother. We love you and miss you so much and hope that wherever you are, you know that we carry you with us always.
Love, Mom, Dad and D.

It worked out that tonight was the monthly support group meeting, so while D.G. and D. hung out at home, I took cupcakes to share with some more of the lovely women who have helped get me through the last year. There were tears and laughter (actually, there was lots of laughter considering why we were all there) and it was a good way to end the day.

2 hours left

Two hours left until the exact time of Reid's "birth", 1:24 am April 3rd. Cupcakes are iced and waiting for breakfast tomorrow morning. (If you can't eat cupcakes for breakfast on your dead baby's birthday, when can you eat cupcakes for breakfast?) Candles are lit and many photos of said candles have been taken. I decided long ago that I would be staying up until at least 1:24 am tonight but didn't really plan for what I would do while waiting for 1:24 am so we've ended up watching various re-runs since D went to bed. Really, today has been a hard enough day as it is, I didn't need to make it more difficult by sitting in the dark and crying.

There will be many more pictures to come, too bad none will feature a sweet little boy smushing cupcake in his hair, but for now, this should cover where we are tonight...

For Freddie

Not funny

Not a fan of April Fools here. Last year, I thought it was be so funny if I had my baby on April 1st. I imagined how I could mess with all my family and friends about baby's arrival or gender. Of course then Reid died less than 2 days later. April 3rd is just too close to April 1st to not be linked in my mind: "You thought you were going to take home a live baby, ha ha, the joke's on you." And then this year: "You thought you could actually get pregnant, ha ha, fooled you again." I am seriously afraid of this time of year now. Next year I may ask to be placed in a medically induced coma from mid-March until the evening of April 2nd. What little mental health I have left needs to be preserved, I just have to find a doctor to agree with me.