Freckle Eye Fancy

Eff you, 2016. And yes, that’s how I really feel. This year has been the best and worst year of my life, and I’m not sure which feeling trumps the other. All I know is that I’m ready for this year to be over. Not to leave this year behind, but to open yet another chapter of our lives, and continue forward. We spent New Years Eve last year in Paris, and spent New Years Day in Disneyland Paris. I don’t think another New Years Eve will ever compare to that! When we got back from Paris, we had less than a week to get Brandon all packed to move to Utah. We moved him down there, found me a job, and put an offer on our second house. He started his new job on January 11th. At the end of the month, Brandon and his family, along with my family, helped us pack our whole house into a trailer, and we said goodbye to our life in Boise. I started my new job on February 1st, and we closed on our house ten days later. Valentine’s day was spent unpacking boxes, with just a small break for dinner at O...

After we lost Carter, so many kind people gave us special gifts with so much meaning behind them. All the material things we've been given make me so happy, because it's just one more thing to hold or to look at that reminds me of Carter.  We have a few airplane ornaments for him that we put on our tree at home: one we bought at Hobby Lobby, one handmade by a good friend of mine (it's a clear glass ball with whispy white feathers at the bottom, and a little blue airplane hanging from the top; it's my favorite), and red biplane ornament given to us by a friend of the Robbins family. When we were taking the ornaments off the tree, I wanted to put the red plane back in the box it came from. On the flap of the box, as I was closing it, I saw that it says "I like the view from up here." The creators of the ornament, or at least the phrase on the box, probably didn't intend for the airplane to represent a child that was lost too soon, but the words were a ten...

Christmas this year was different, as expected. As much as I usually love Christmas, I couldn't wait for it to be over this year, but it actually wasn't as awful as I expected it to be.  We had planned to stay home and celebrate Christmas just the three of us, but we decided that staying home without Carter might be too hard. On Christmas Eve, we made our way up to Brandon's family's cabin at Bear Lake. It rained most of the way to Logan, which was so weird. There was no snow on the ground either; even more weird for Logan. We stopped in Logan for lunch, then went to the cemetery to see Carter. When we decorated his trees, we took one strand of lights since we had only bought one tree, which left his second tree, purchased on a whim, unlit. We took a second strand of lights with us on Christmas Eve to put on the second tree, but the first strand was dead, even after we replaced the batteries. So he only had one lit tree for Christmas, but now we know for next year! T...

At 8:51 am every Thursday, and on the 27th of each month, times seems to stop. I'm awake for it every time. Whether it's hours before or just minutes, I'm awake for it every single time. For nine months, I counted down the number of weeks and now, I'm counting up. And it's not counting up the age of our baby; I'm counting up from the worst day of my life, holding myself in its misery and beauty because I never want to forget a single second of it. This has become my new normal. Lack of sleep not from late night feedings and changings, but from late night thoughts and tears. Lack of social interaction not because we have a newborn taking all our time and energy, but because social anxiety peaks in grief. New traditions started not at home with a baby, but at the cemetery with our baby below us.  The new normal has positives too. A newfound strength in Brandon and myself individually, but also in our marriage. A love so deep and so strong that I didn't know...

The past ten days have kicked my butt. There’s not really a way to describe my grief, I can only tell you that it comes and goes. Usually it comes and goes over the course of days, but the past week or so it has come and go over the course of hours. Sometimes I’m okay, playing with the cats or laughing with Brandon, but the times I’m not are hard. There are the tiny, quiet tears that get cried when I’m thinking about the awful, beautiful 24 hours we spent at the hospital, and then there are the loud, painful cries that come when I fully think about what we lost. I just feel really really empty. Everything we do right now just feels wrong. We're missing a person for all these families thing we're going to. We went to two movies this week, but we shouldn't be doing anything but staying at home because of the baby. I'm getting roughly nine straight hours of sleep every night when I should only be getting maybe two at a time. I read a whole book in one day when I shouldn...

Last night we went to see Collateral Beauty. I wanted to go last night, rather than on a cheap Tuesday, because I knew it was going to make me cry, and I would rather cry in front of fifteen strangers instead of ninety. I did cry, but not entirely out of sadness. In the movie, Will Smith's character loses his six year old daughter. We lost Carter, but losing an unborn child is different than losing one you have spent years with; I couldn't fully relate to his loss, I only know my own. But I cried because the message of the movie is something I've been striving for since the afternoon of October 26th. In the movie, a character says "just make sure you notice the collateral beauty," which is far easier said than done. But I've been trying.  There have been a few situations in the past weeks that could have been perceived as super, super crappy, or actually kind of neat, and I've realized that it is up to me how I perceive them. When I was buying a Christm...

Lately it has been hard to write one big cohesive post because there are so many things that are happening and so many emotions that I'm feeling. So this post is going to be written in lengthy bullet points so that I can separate my ideas. And when I say lengthy, I mean real lengthy. So, sorry. This past week has been rough in a different way than the weeks prior have been. I wrote in a different post about how I don't want to let my experience affect my happiness for other people who are having babies right now, and I feel like I've done a pretty good job. I went and visited a friend at work so I could see pictures of his babies, and our close friends brought their new baby over a couple weeks ago. But in the past few days, I have had at least five facebook friends post pictures of their brand new babies while they are still in the hospital, and it is killing me. If you are one of these people are you are reading this post, please please please do not be offended by thi...

I woke up this morning feeling mad. Confused, tricked, betrayed, angry. And I'm feeling all of these things not solely because of the fact that Carter was taken from us, but because of the things that have come after. Being angry doesn't bring Carter back, I've accepted that. But I'm mad about all the other things that have been messed up because we lost him. These first six weeks that I've spent recovering were supposed to be filled with late nights, loss of sleep, frustration at figuring out what he wants, feedings, and figuring out our new life together. Instead, I'm left wanting for all those things. I heard our friends talk about how their new baby isn't sleeping...I'd give anything to not sleep again if it meant taking care of Carter. Our plans for holidays changed completely. Instead of staying home and trying to figure out how to cook a turkey in a crock pot, we went to Boise for Thanksgiving in our new crossover vehicle that felt all too big ...

I think it's weird to say that I am so pleased with how Carter's headstone turned out, but I really really am. I didn't want to just post the picture and let you all see it on Facebook and Instagram, because I wanted to show/explain to you why it is so special. A few months ago, I posted this picture that Brandon had drawn for the nursery. I nagged and nagged and nagged, thinking how sweet it would be for each of our kids to have had something drawn specifically for them by their dad, and finally, he gave in. This was the result: Isn't it so good?? It incorporated the airplanes on the crib sheet and the art that we had hung above the crib, and I was in love with it. Fast forward to the past five weeks. We had to decide what we wanted to do for a headstone, and all I knew I wanted was to see if they could put Brandon's drawing on the headstone. There just really are no words to convey my happiness with it. You guys, it's perfect. I never thought it...