Triggers, triggers, everywhere.

A few days ago, Facebook was nice enough to show me my pregnancy announcement from 7 years ago, complete with ultrasound pictures. [I hate you more and more, Facebook.]

The calm before the storm.


We waited until we were "safe" at 12 weeks to announce it. We were so excited. I spent weeks garage-sale'ing for gender neutral stuff and hours agonizing over cribs and baby gear, none of which we ended up needing. My garage sale "finds" are in a box in the basement where they've been for 7 years and I think the box will be moving to our new house with us because I can't really bring myself to get rid of it, even now. 

I binge watched all of Grey's Anatomy this winter (my first time watching it, and spoiler, they have babies die lots of times in the 12 or 13 seasons..) It turns out there is a spinoff from it, Private Practice, which features a high risk doctor and therefore lots and lots of pregnancy issues. I'm only midway through season 2 but I was watching it the other day while Lucas was in the room playing a game on the tablet. I didn't think he was paying attention to the tv, until all of a sudden he asked me,
"When we have our next baby...a girl baby...can you make sure we have lots of medicine?"

Ugh. After telling him there were no guarantees for a 'next baby' and definitely not a 'girl baby', and evading and asking more questions, he wants us to make sure we have lots of medicine handy so 'our next girl baby' DOESN'T DIE TOO. We talked a little but I mostly changed the subject because I didn't really want to have an in-depth conversation with a five year old that sometimes babies die even with all the medicine. (Actually I'm pretty sure I took the easy out and said yeah, I'll make sure we have lots of medicine). It's bad enough that in his 5 year old reality, sometimes babies die. Oh, and he also wants to name the next baby Olivia. I ignored that because it's assuming we have another baby, a girl, and explaining why we can't name this hypothetical baby the same name as his sister just didn't seem worth the discussion in that moment. If we have another baby and it's a girl we can tackle it then. 

It's crazy how much Lucas talks about Olivia while Matthew mostly seems oblivious still. Then again, Matthew just now started caring about his baby brother Ethan so probably asking him to have opinions/thoughts on an abstract 'sister in heaven' who was here and gone long before him may be asking a lot. 

The challenges are very different now then they were several years ago when the grief and loss was so new, but they are still always there, lingering.