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.