Christmas in pictures/video

 

(These are not all his presents, they are all the presents in general- we actually only gave him a couple.)

Here he is "helping" me wrap presents, the night before Christmas Eve.

"walking" with my dad on Christmas Eve

 

2 of many Olivia ornaments, Lucas's only ornament so far. (For a moment I felt guilty that we have 5 or so Olivia ornaments and only one for Lucas, but then I realized it's our third Christmas without Olivia and only our first with Lucas, he'll catch up.)

(I never did find stockings I liked for Lucas and Olivia, then found the last 2 super cheap the day before xmas eve . I've since had a much much nicer Lucas stocking made by pottery barn kids after xmas with his name on it, they were out of the angel stocking that I plan to have made with Olivia's name next year. I made Joe's stocking our first year of marriage, pretty pathetic, I found the Santa and reindeer as a suction cup window decoration, took the suction cup off it, glued it with fabric glue to the plain red stocking, then put his name on it with glitter glue/paint. It has held up amazingly well, I'd say.)

Christmas with and without.

Well, we all survived Luke's first Christmas, and our third Christmas without Olivia.

Christmas has been hard every year (well, maybe not as much the first year- when we were still mostly numb and avoided it all), but this year was especially challenging, as we tried to balance celebrating our first Christmas with Lucas with missing our daughter.

It's the little things and not so little things that are a punch to the gut: Baby's First Christmas ornament that we only have for one baby, stockings, visiting the cemetary on Christmas morning instead of going to church, friend's toddlers all dressed up in front of their tree.

Most of our time at home with just the three of us, I kept thinking about how different it should be but isn't. This is our third Christmas, and it still really sucks that she isn't here.

I think now that we have Lucas here, we felt forced (by ourselves/mommy guilt)to do the Christmas stuff again that we haven't done or to the same extent the previous years. This was the first year I put our tree up since Olivia died (and I waited until the last minute, the 23rd, before I finally did it, and seriously contemplated not putting a tree up at all since it's not like Luke will know or remember the difference- this year at least.) But he LOVES the tree- more than presents and wrapping paper and boxes. So I'm glad I sucked it up and put it up. Anyway, we put the tree up and stockings, shopped (mostly online, thank god for the internet) and wrapped presents, etc. I made and sent out Christmas cards. All of that normal stuff.

And I mostly felt normal. The night before Christmas Eve, after we put the tree up and Lucas to bed, he woke back up while I was in the middle of wrapping presents. I let him crawl around and "help" (which he did by climbing on presents, pulling ornaments off the tree, etc.) while I tried to finish and avoid a trip to the ER with an injured baby. (Sucessful, though it took till 2 am to finally get done.) Even though Lucas wasn't especially helpful, he was really cute, and I thought about how much better this year is with him here vs. last year when he was just in my belly. He really has filled our lives with so much light and laughter and happiness...better than anything I could ask for for Christmas.

We went and saw extended family- Christmas Eve with my mom's side (then at my parent's house later since my siblings both worked Christmas day), Christmas Day we did our own Christmas, then to the cemetery, then to my dad's family. (Joe's family is all in PA.) Luke did pretty well with the choas and so many people and our schedule and everything totally off. He got plenty of presents, although he was pretty ambivalent about unwrapping them. All in all, it was good. Bittersweet as always, but a lot of sweet to go with our bitter this year. Hopefully next Christmas will be even better.

Baby wake up calls

Yesterday morning I woke up to Lucas sitting up in his pack n play next to me, putting his hand on my cheek and grinning. God, I love that baby. (And really appreciate that he didn't try to claw my face off, or pull my hair, or stick his hand in my mouth.) He is awesome (even face clawing, hair pulling, and trying to gag me with his hand). First time he's mostly slept through the night in a long time, fingers crossed for more of that. (Did not happen last night, but I can hardly complain about sleeping from 2-5 am with a warm cuddly perfect baby on my chest in the recliner.)

I started volunteering Friday and really liked it. I am really excited about the prospect of maybe someday having a job where I would get to wear scrubs every day. I am in the radiology dept but mainly helping the person who does the CT machines. I help get and move patients, set up the room, run file to the doctors, etc. They are apparently going to let me load the CT machine with contrast dye, too. I am not doing much in ultrasound yet, but the hospital I am volunteering at is really small and so I probably won't see many or any OB patients since they have an u/s machine on the OB floor. The time I'm there goes by pretty fast.

Luke and Joe had a rough night on Friday but he was good last night. Wednesday my mom is watching him for the first time, I'm nervous about it, mainly because he's so attached to me and I don't want him to cry the whole time. Hopefully it will go okay. I am not used to being so busy! It is going to be a crazy 6ish-9 months (school 2x a week and online, volunteering 2x a week) and then be nothing again.

I am horrible at Christmas this year. Our tree is still not up. I don't have stockings for Lucas and Olivia. (And Joe's stocking I made with glitter glue in college- it's pretty lame.) I have bought a few things online for Luke and Joe but that is it. It's just been busy. I think I will take Luke out shopping in a bit, mainly I'm struggling to keep up with everything. I'm pumping a lot in case I get pregnant and have to wean (can't breastfeed on blood thinners), which takes a lot of time and constantly doing dishes and washing pump parts, plus Lucas is really mobile and loves cords and escaping his 'baby jail' (a fort of gates in the middle of our living room- our lame/sucky/lazy babyproofing attempt) so that makes getting things done tough. I did get our Christmas cards *mostly* sent out though, so yay for small progress. (Video of Luke on the previous post, it wouldn't let me type on it.)

Christmas, 19 weeks, 27

Christmas is always tough for most parents who have lost children. This year was a little bit easier and more bearable than last year in some ways, and harder in other ways. Last Christmas, I was *supposed* to still be pregnant...this was supposed to be Olivia's first Christmas and she would have been almost one, it was hard to think about all of the stuff we were missing out on with her.

We went to Olivia's grave and left a little stuffed Winnie the Pooh. I wrote her name on the tag, in case it gets blown away and someone wants to go to the trouble of returning it, and realized how few things there are to write her name on. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the teddy bear and pink birthday duck that we had left there on her birthday in September were still there even now, because she's buried in a national cemetery, the only thing you are really technically supposed to leave is flowers, and there are even rules about the kinds of flowers (can't be fake after April or something like that.) So, we never really expect the things we leave there to last long, but it's always nice when they still are there.

We survived the rest of it okay. It's still a struggle. There are things I wish we had done differently this year and I think next year we will hopefully be better at finding a better balance of what's right for us. Our first Christmas without Olivia, we did mostly nothing, just wanting to pretend Christmas didn't exist and for it to be over with (we did go to her grave, I think we always will.) This was our second year, and we did the normal things that we did before Olivia and added visiting her grave around the usual schedule. Next year, I'm not sure about yet, but we'll figure out what works for our family, I hope, finding the right balance of missing and remembering Olivia and celebrating with her little brother. There aren't really rules for this, but what I do know is that the usual routines don't really work for us very well anymore, even now, that became very apparent this year.Next year I won't try to force it so much.

Today I turned 27 and also 19 weeks pregnant. I got lots of sweet birthday wishes that I really appreciated and had a nice time with my family.  I'm not really in a great mood for celebrating or doing much, the holidays just make it kind of draining. Raja the elephant turned 18 today, which makes me feel really freaking old, because I remember when he was born (it was sort of a big deal because he was the first Asian elephant ever born at the St.Louis zoo and elephant pregnancies take like 2+ years.) It's been funny how many people have mentioned Raja's birthday (he had a birthday party that they featured on the news, apparently, Joe said he wished he had taken off work so we could have went...I'm okay with not going to the zoo today, it's pretty cold out.)

I've been pretty calm this week, relatively speaking, about this pregnancy. I guess my focus has been more on missing Olivia than making up things to worry about. My blood pressure has creeped up a little bit, but not alarmingly high or numbers I've never gotten before, they are still well within my normal range, just a little bit higher than usual. I think I'm chalking it up to the holidays, my blood pressure was up a bit around Thanksgiving too. I've had a tiny bit of really mild heartburn too, not even bad enough that I need to take anything for it to be comfortable, and I know it's normal to have heartburn during pregnancy. Still, it concerns me a little, because with Olivia I was having really bad heartburn one week and in the hospital with my liver on the verge of rupturing the very next week. I'd feel a lot better if the heartburn would just go away for 10 more weeks or so. Lucas is moving a lot some days, and others not so much though I'll still feel him at least a few times every day. I think I've felt a few kicks a couple of times, but nothing blatantly obvious yet and nothing that Joe can feel just yet. Hopefully that comes soon. This week will hopefully be rather uneventful, no appointments or anything until next Friday when we have our next growth ultrasound.