When goodbye comes before hello

I usually write exclusively on this blog about losing Dylan, but, with a broken heart, I'm including another loss. Dylan and Lola now have a brother or sister in heaven. We didn't know we were pregnant until I miscarried this week. What a blow this has been. As if losing one child isn't hard enough, we are now dealing with the loss of another. We didn't even have a chance to get excited about this baby. There was no positive pregnancy test- until it was already over. August 18th would have been the estimated due date. I can already imagine Lola running around, curious of a strange baby in her house. But that baby will never be.

Three pregnancies; only one living child. I will now say that the most disappointing aspect of my life has been trying to have a family. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would lose a child. And after Dylan's death, I prayed that I would never know another loss. It couldn't happen again, right? For some people, their big dreams come true. Seems that for me, it is my worst fears that are realized.

Dylan has a new playmate, which is sadly comforting to me. I have never really worried about where he is; I guess I know in my heart that he's being taken care of. Now I know that he has a hand to hold and someone to play trucks with. If only I could have held that hand, too.

And so we continue our journey, now a family of five. I will continue to hug Lola tightly- I do every day. I know how precious her life is and how quickly it could be taken away from me. I pray that she never knows the heart ache I have experienced as a mother. Being a parent is a very hard job. Being a loss parent is indescribable.

4 simple words

On this date last year, I was 19 weeks pregnant with our second baby. We had just gotten through Dylan's first birthday, which was hard but not as bad as the anticipation that had built up for months before it. I had survived about 14 weeks of morning sickness and a trip to the ER for excruciatingly painful kidney stones- which is even more frightening for someone who has already lost a child and didn't need to be hanging out in the hospital that he died in. We had scheduled our "big" ultrasound for January 18th. For most people, it's where they get all excited about finding out the gender of their baby. For Tom and I, there was a lot of fear and anxiety. We had seen our baby on the big screen already. I know what other moms don't, though. There are no guarantees that there was still a heartbeat. I was terrified the entire time, but started to relax as my doctor started the scan, telling us everything we were looking at the whole time. He knew Dylan's history from our chart- he had scanned him, too- and we knew that we'd be seeing a lot more of Dr. Muise over the next 19 weeks or so. When he was done doing all his measurements, he asked if we wanted to know the baby's gender. We said yes, and I waited for him to confirm my hunch that Baby Mathews #2 was a boy. Then he said 4 amazing words that I will never forget: "Your daughter is perfect". I had waited what seemed like forever to hear that. She was perfect. She is perfect. Dylan was going to have a little sister.