Still.

That’s the best way I can sum up how things have been over the past few weeks.

Much of the chatter in my mind has calmed down since the baby was born. Sleep comes easier and runs deeper than it did for most all of last year.

While last year I feel like I spent hours each day thinking of Littlegirl and our lives since she died and fretting over my wife’s pregnancy, this year I’ve just been a bit blank. Maybe I was always like this and just didn’t realise or perhaps I’m just taking a break from being stressed and occupied with loss.

Our new baby is fantastic and we love her to bits. Her older brother is being great too with only a few accidental knees to the head and one finger biting incident to account for so far.

Last week we registered the baby’s birth, returning once again to the place where we registered Littlegirl’s death not so many months before. A lighter occasion this time, but still with the ghost of experiences past.

We also took the dust cover off the double buggy we had bought in anticipation of Littlegirl’s arrival. It had been ‘up on bricks’ for a year or so covered by a sheet in my mother in law’s house, waiting in pristine condition for someone to use it.

On the whole things have been great. It has been nice to feel somewhat normal again. We meet other parents of new children and they chat to us and we can talk to them….we’re in the gang again. They always ask how many kids we have, and we’ll tell them three and their ages and generally say nothing when they say how tough it must be to have 3 children under three years old…

First: our friends baby, who was extremely sick, is now home and quite well! She’ll need a third operation between the age of 3 to 6 months but on the whole should be fine. Hooray for life.

Second: This may warrant investigation, but I don’t think the following piece in Time magazine on how Fa.cebook is changing the grieving process quite applies to the baby loss gang. Perhaps I’m wrong.

That is all. I am in work.

Staying in is so the new going out.

A quiet evening was had in the Irishdad household. Young son is oblivious to the occasion, dear wife is tired and tiny baby is on a strict routine of sleeping 23 hrs a day and feeding the rest of the time.

As Irishmam went to bed earlier, I watched and enjoyed Frost/Nixon while drinking a bottle of Riesling. Then, shortly before midnight I looked out the window and saw that it had started to snow. How pretty.

So, here’s a couple of photos from this evening of the blue moon rising and the schnee, plus a link to a great track by Alice in Chains – one of my all time favorite bands of all time. Be warned, the song is not one to make you reach for your happy shoes. It is beautiful though and reminds me of some of the lower days of the past year.

A blue moon rises

Midnight snow, 01 01 '10

Good Morrow.

First up, our friends’ baby has taken a very positive turn and is off the ventilator.  I say tentatively that she’s through the worst.

***

Back to 2009, and I’m finding it hard to ‘define’ the year. On paper it has been the worst year of my life as I’ve been grieving the death of my daughter, but how can I reconcile that with the birth of  a precious adorable third child?

I don’t know. It has been the worst of times. It has been the best of times.

I can’t decide whether we should be drinking champagne tomorrow evening, or just letting new year’s eve slip by while giving two fingers to 2009 and all the pain and tears we endured.

Really, it should be a combination of both. I now truly understand why the birth of a child should be celebrated. We should dance in the streets when a baby is born.

Also, we should probably give ourselves a little credit for simply getting through the year. Anyone who reads this blog has had a tough year and goddamit gets little credit for having got up each day and kept things together. So for that reason alone, we/you deserve to say ‘I survived 2009, now gimme that bottle’.

On the other hand, the coming year brings a new decade and we leave our beloved children that much more in the past. I know, I know, they are in our hearts and will always be with us. But their dates, their conception and births, are now in a nine or an eight -or beyond, while we move into TEN without them. We’re being dragged into the future whether we like it or not.

I think I’ll raise my glass, bidding adieu to  2009 and farewell, with respect, to the worst days I’ve ever experienced. I’ll raise again to my wife and my children living and deceased, and to all of you who have read or commented on this blog during the year.

I wish for a positive 2010 for all of us.

Just a quick update – our friends’ baby who has been extremely sick for about a week now, underwent a second operation yesterday as the doctors felt that without it they would not be able to take her off life support.

She made it through the op, and now a further 24 hours have passed, so they hope to take her off the ventilator later today or tomorrow.  Small steps, but in the right direction thankfully.

I haven’t posted much of late as I’ve been busy looking after Littleboy and my good wife, who came home from the hospital a couple of days after her section.

Our baby girl was slightly premature, but thankfully she came home today. The doctors were delighted with her progress so she’s been discharged and is here beside me now. What a great gift for Christmas Eve…and such a difference from the complete misery of last year.

Our happiness is tempered by the knowledge that the baby girl of a friend of my wife’s, born just 5 days before our own child, is critically ill in hospital.  She hadn’t been feeding well, so when mother brought her to the doctor  earlier this week he detected heart problems and called an ambulance immediately. A heart op followed that same day…and now she’s on life support with two more operations ahead of her.

In short, her parents and family have been landed in hell and there’s nothing they or anyone else can do but wait and hope that she’s strong enough to pull through.

I understand that there are suggestions that as she’s made it through 36 hours the doctors are hopeful that she’ll be well enough for a second operation shortly.

S0, if you have a moment please spare a positive thought for this little girl and her scared, bewildered parents.

Finally, I wish you all the best this Christmas.

…Girl!

Littleboy and Littlegirl have a baby sister!

Everything went smoothly today. Our little baby was born at 1126am, weighing 5, 11. She’s being kept under observation as she’s a little short of breath but we’re told this is to be expected for her gestation (36 weeks and 6 days)

I’ll write more tomorrow, for today I’m just a bit numb about it all. Obviously glad everything has gone well but my overall feeling is just that I’m tired! (relief, methinks)  All the recent sleepless nights are looking for payback.

I’ve a glass of quality Crozes Hermitage that I bought on Sunday in a fit of optimism, and a hunk of nice cheese. After that I’m going to sleep.

Thanks to you all for your well-wishes over recent days, it has really meant a lot to me and Irishmam.

Bis morgen.

I’ve been trying to write a post that expresses my thoughts about the last year…but I can’t come up with anything that makes sense.

This year has been the worst year of our lives. Hopefully it will prove to be the lowest of our days.

Now, just over a year after our second child was stillborn, we have so much to look forward to. Our third baby is scheduled to be born on Tuesday morning (15th December). Call me selfish but I’d really like it if things went pretty much normally for us. A birth without drama, a live healthy baby.

The last few weeks, even months, have been difficult. Neither of us have slept well for as long as we can remember so we’re just getting more and more tired. From time to time one or both of us will be so stressed out we’re just about keeping a lid on things, be it from worry about the pregnancy or all the reminders of Littlegirl’s death and birth and the days around that period that this time of year brings up.

Now, we’re nearly there and our thought turn to nerves about the actual birth and the fact that we’ve thought so little about the prospect of actually having a baby in our lives that I at least feel very unprepared for what is to come. I don’t know what to expect or how I’ll feel about it all. I suspect its going to be tough to reconcile my happiness at the birth and how much it reminds me about how hard things were with Littlegirl – and how much we have lost.

I know that this is a lovely problem to have!

So, tomorrow my wife has one last check up with the doctor in the morning, and we’ll go over to the hospital in the evening to get her settled in for the night. On Tuesday we’re told that we are first on the list for Caesareans.

Who knows, maybe by lunchtime we will be taking our first steps into another new chapter in our lives.

*******************************

Having recently done a gardening course I’ve concluded that grief is like making compost! You take all the horseshit you’ve been dumped with and all the cuttings of social stress that come with the loss. Every layer of difficulty gets piled up in your mind, sometimes to be dug over, generally just to undergo its own slow transformation into something that can hopefully provide the basis for healthy growth in the future. It takes time. It can’t be rushed, and shouldn’t be tampered with. It needs a little air now and then or it become unhealthy.

So that’s a year completed without our daughter.

Her anniversary and the weekend went ok all in all.

The day certainly had its moments, but we had our son with us so he served as a distraction and motivation not to dwell on how horrible things were a year ago and get too upset. When we told him that we were bringing flowers up to Littlegirl’s grave because it was her birthday he asked if we were all going to dance up there. Gotta love the innocence.

After that we planned to go to a visit a farm and see the animals, but the farmers made the fatal mistake of putting the mother pig with her ten two-day-old piglets on view out front…and by the time we were done with that cuteness it started to rain so we never made it in to see the rest of the animals.

That was it for the day really, we didn’t do anything too symbolic or significant, perhaps were just not ready for that yet.

Our parents and some family went to a service of remembrance for babies who die around the time of death organised by ISANDS, which by all accounts was a most beautiful affair, but sounded just too sad and raw for us this time around. We’ll plan to go next year.

We came to the conclusion that the Littlegirl’s anniversary was a) worse in anticipation and b) potentially more difficult for other people than it was for us.

Because we think about her and her loss every single day. We’ve thought about her – and for a long time nothing and no-one else – everyday for a year. That’s what you do when your baby dies, it’s natural and unavoidable.

For friends and family who have not mulled over her death quite so much, when the anniversary swings around they take time to reflect on her absence and remember the time of her death and all those difficult thoughts that are really painful and uncomfortable when you dwell on them.

We’ve been living with the loss every day for a year, so this state of affairs is not shocking to us anymore. Well, most of the time it’s not shocking…sometimes it still hits like a punch in the guts.

We got some nice texts and a couple of cards from people who recalled that this was the time of the anniversary, which was nice. It’s funny though, because when I think about it, it’s like anniversary week around here. There’s the anniversary of the last day of our former lives – before everything came crashing down; the anniversary of finding out the baby had died, of her birth, of the date she was scheduled to be born (yesterday)…of the funeral (tomorrow). I suspect people don’t realise that all these ‘days’ are passing, but that’s ok.

Right, the twitching in my eye suggests it’s time to go to bed.

Still to come: thoughts on the year, and on the week to come.

We were quite impressed with the people putting in our bathroom, until they had a fight outside the house with one threatening to kill the other.

Hosting a fight in your garden, where you think the Bathroom Guy is being shanked by the Tiler Guy while pregnant mother and child cower inside the house does not figure high on the things we need in our life right now.

Here’s what went down in da hood.

Everything was finished bar hanging a mirror and putting down the saddle under the door. This latter job should have been done by the tiler during the week but for some reason wasn’t. So, when Bathroom Guy came this evening to hang the mirror and get paid he made a phone call to voice his disappointment to the tiler, who in return went seven shades of bananas. Bathroom guy hung up. Tiler guy kept phoning and shouting down the line.

I arrived home into the midst of this, but didn’t realise there was that much going on between the guys. So I sat in the living room with Irishmam and Littleboy waiting for Bathroom guy to finish up so we could give the wee lad his bath and pack him off to bed.

Well, next thing, Tiler guy turns up at the front door and invites Mr Bathroom outside for a chat. As soon as the door closed all hell broke loose, with a lot of noisy shouting and scuffling. There was the sound of clanging metal as well which made me think that Bathroom guy might now be wearing the door saddle.

I told wife and child (one scared, one oblivious) to go upstairs and close the bedroom door behind them while I wondered should I go outside or just lock the door and leave Bathroom Guy to his fate. (Through all this we could only hear but not see what was going on.)

After a minute or so the guys moved off about 50 feet where Tiler Guy continued telling Bathroom guy he was going to kill him. I followed them out and, keeping my distance, told them they had about five seconds before I called the police…and that I had a scared pregnant wife inside the house. At this Tiler Guy screamed “Sorry, it’s him, he needs to pay me my money” and sped off.

Bathroom guy was unharmed but shaking with adrenalin, as was I. He told me they’d been working together for years and he’d never seen the likes of it, but that Tiler Guy’s child was sick in hospital and he was under a lot of pressure.

He apologised profusely and said he couldn’t believe what had happened…and then started talking about coming back inside to finish off the work. Yeah, right. I told him that my wife was terrified and we had our own things to deal with over the weekend and he’d have to come back on Monday.

All I can conclude is that this is what people under stress look like. Times are tough in this country right now and the mood is increasingly sour for a number of reasons.  I suspect bathroom guy has cashflow problems and is late paying his team, so the tiler is probably under money pressure and now he has a sick child. Keep this going for a while and somethings going to give eventually.

So, that was Thursday the 3rd of December 2009. A completely abnormal day exactly one year after the last ‘normal’ day of our lives. 365 days ago at this exact time  we were still two regular people, watching telly on the couch expecting our second baby to be born in five days time.  This evening we’re sitting on the same couch talking about our day and the days to come, wondering how we came to have people fighting in our garden!

I hope the guys sort things out, and that the tiler’s child is ok, but really, I don’t need this shit.

In fairness though, the bathroom is lovely.