Freckle Eye Fancy

The title of this post is so completely opposite about my life, and I think it's hilarious. There is no balance to our lives anymore. Everything is the complete opposite of the way it's supposed to be. We spend weekends in a cemetery instead of the nursery. We spend nights sleeping hard instead of waking up to feed and change a baby. We watch a ton of Netflix when we should be watching our sweet boy explore the world. Sure, there are some beautiful things that have come from losing multiple babies, but for the most part, our world is in a constant state of imbalance and chaos. Nothing is the way it should be. After our miscarriage I told myself that I could have two weeks to grieve hard, eat whatever I wanted, and not work out. Monday of the third week rolled around, and right after my counseling session I called Brandon, told him there had been a change of plans, and asked if he'd stop for Ben & Jerry's on his way home. Thus began a third week of heavy griev...

I have six other posts that have been drafted within the last week, all just waiting to be shared. I planned to post one of them today, but decided to write something else in hopes of cleansing my soul today. Turns out that I just have a lot feelings. These last few weeks have been SUCKY. My emotions have been all over the board, I'm exhausted all the time, and social anxiety is at an all time high. There were a few days last week that were really good, and I have a feeling that things will start to look up again soon, but overall...wow. It has just been rough. Ever since the miscarriage, things have been exceptionally hard. I think I'm just starting to kind of consider the idea that Brandon and I may not be able to ever bring a baby home. Our history is evidence enough that it is a possibility. I know we could adopt, but adoption is expensive, so it's a little discouraging. Actually, a lot discouraging. I don't know. Anyway, that's where I'm at. We've be...

Original post on Still Mothers . So many people have told me “you’re so strong.” Sometimes I want to punch them, but most of the time I just shrug and tell them that I don’t have any other choice. My husband repeatedly tells me that I do, in fact, have a choice. I could choose to stay in bed all day, but I get up and go to work instead. I could choose to cry and be angry all day every day, but I choose to press forward and embrace any emotion I feel, including happiness. I could hate every other woman that announces her pregnancy, but instead I think about how lucky they are that they get to experience a part of life that I loved so much. When discussing this with someone the other day, they responded, “You do have that choice, you’ll always have that choice, but you are not giving yourself that choice. That is not one of your  options.” I had never thought it of it like that before. There are many reasons I give as to why I don’t have the option to fall apart: I have a job...

Like most of our other weekends in the past month, our anniversary weekend was super relaxing! Friday night, we had fun going back through pictures old pictures of us, then got Costa Vida for dinner and just hung out all night. We've been really into Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy lately (because we're 90), so once we laid down to watch those, the couch was basically our home for the night. We slept in on Saturday, then went to lunch at our new favorite place, Village Baker. Brandon's parents and grandparents were in town for a reunion, and they all came over for a few hours that afternoon. Brandon's grandparents had never been to our house before, so it was fun to give them a quick tour and share the nursery and all our Carter things with them. We have a bear that weighs what Carter weighed when he was born, and we have molds of his little hands and feet. I love sharing these things with people, because I feel like it gives them more of an idea of what he was like ph...

I can't believe it has already been a year since the last anniversary post! Times flies when you're having fun. Or when you're losing your mind. Or both, really. We did this last year, but let's talk for a second about all of the accomplishments we've had since we've been together: We've taken 17 vacations (that's three more than last year!), 16 jobs/positions (we added two this year), still have lived in three cities, owned two houses, and adopted two cats (though I wish it were more). Last year, we were ten weeks away from meeting our first baby. This year, we are about two and a half weeks past our third pregnancy that ended too soon. We've been blessed with our sweet Carter boy and little bean, and our family is now twice as big as it was at this time last year. We've spent more time in Logan in the past ten months than I ever thought we would, and we've had more sad conversations than I can count, but we've also been infinitely bl...

There have been so many times in the last ten months that I have felt lost. I feel confused about who I am, who I will be, and how on earth I will ever be anything other than the person I have been since we lost Carter. It's an interesting thing, to try and describe yourself. I can tell you very easily that I have brown hair and hazel eyes, that my nose is a little crooked, and that my skin is whiter than a ghost's. I love laughing, writing, eating, singing, watching movies, cats, ice cream, and hanging out with my husband. I can also tell you, with a little more difficulty, that I am kind, silly, deeper than I may seem, and that I care about others more than myself. I have a love/hate relationship with people in general, get bored way too easily, and that the only time I feel 100% confident in myself is when I'm dancing in a crowded room. There are surface level things that you probably know, then there are deeper things that you don't. There might be even things yo...

I had some nasty comments left on a few of my pictures this morning. They started with the picture of Carter I posted last night, and went all the way back to a picture in December. I always wonder why people waste their time trolling feeds they don't care to look at. If you don't want to see those pictures, go find someone else to stalk. But further than that, why troll the feed of someone who is clearly hurting? What gives them the right to drive that hurt in deeper? Let's go back to yesterday. I was having a SUPER crappy day. Like, on the brink of tears all day, babies everywhere, wanted to just lay down and cry kind of day. We allowed ourselves some retail therapy, ate lots of food, and watched a lot of parks and rec. Late last night, I started scrolling back through pictures. I got to one I had posted of me with Carter, but honestly, the photo in black and white doesn't do his cute face justice. So I opened the shared file we have with all of Carter's pictur...

If I had a dollar for every time I've said that losing a baby is confusing, I would probably have enough money to adopt every child in the world. Confusing isn't the only word I would use to describe it (though it's one of the more appropriate ones), but besides being sad and angry, confusion is what I feel the most. I started thinking about this on Monday. It was 11:04, and I got up to go to the bathroom at work. As soon as I walked in the door, I thought, seven days and ten minutes ago, I walked into the exact same stall and found that I was bleeding. Seven days and ten minutes ago, I was pregnant, and now I'm not. In my last letter to little bean, I wrote about how it was weird to not have any active participation in her delivery. With this miscarriage, I just stayed home. I was kind of an active participant, kind of not. Either way, one day the baby had a heartbeat, the next, it didn't. One day there was a baby in me, a few days later there wasn't. One we...

I read an article  a while ago that sparked this post. I shared the article on Facebook, so some of you may have read it. In it, the mother writes "People comment on how “strong” my husband and I are. I don’t want to be strong, I want to be normal. There is nothing strong about living without your child. We don’t have any other choice but to go on without her; to go on living some semblance of a life while constantly missing her. There is no other option." I've thought about this a lot since we lost Carter, and even more so since we lost our little girl, and now, after our miscarriage. People are always telling us how strong we are. We, like the mom that wrote the article, don't want to be strong. Trust me, I would love to have both my babies here and have people tell me I'm weak all day long. I would far take that over losing our babies and having to be strong. It takes so much work to be "strong." It is so hard to wake up every single day, get out o...

To fully tell this story, I need to back up a bit. Before we went to Disney World, I really thought I was pregnant. I was having some symptoms, and I just felt pregnant. But test after test confirmed that I wasn’t. I took one more test the day we got home, and again, negative. I was still confused as to why I was having symptoms, so I called my doctor and asked to get my blood drawn so we could make sure I was ectopically pregnant. I wasn’t, but I had started having some pain in my abdomen, so we made another appointment to go see him. He wondered if it was maybe appendicitis, so we did another blood draw to check my blood cell counts, and all were normal. Four days after that I was in a lot of pain, so I went in for an ultrasound and found out that I had an ovarian cyst. I wasn’t upset by this, because our bodies make cysts for a living, and one cyst isn’t anything out of control, plus if it is something that has happened before, it kind of explains why it took us a little bit to ...

May 23, 2017 Hi Little Bean. I miss you so much. I haven’t written to you since the excitement the day after the ER, and now you’re gone. The two weeks since we found out about your swelling have gone so terribly fast, yet I feel like we had just enough time with you before we lost you. Thank you for staying with me through Mother’s Day. And thank you for coming to us at all. We love you so so much. I came back to work yesterday, bean, and I have felt pregnant both days. I have gotten a little bit of afternoon sickness, have been so tired, and if I didn’t know any better, swear I could have felt you wiggling around in there. But you’re not here, and my body is still confused. One minute I was pregnant, the next I wasn’t. I don’t know how to comprehend the change that I had no part in. With Carter, I was an active participant in his delivery. With you, I was asleep on a table. I’m waiting to hear from the doctor if he was able to have you cremated or not. I’m going to guess he wasn’t...