A Bit of a Catch-Up Post!!

So, I guess I kinda left my handful of followers hanging a few months back with promises of pictures from Bug's birthday bash!! Life kinda got crazy, but here I am attempting once again to start blogging regularly!! So let's do some catching up!!

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First off...the promised pics of the birthday bash!! 

The driveway was lined with orange cones leading up to the door and in the entryway were hard hats and aprons for the kids (these were their party favors).

 The table was decorated to look like a road...all in black, orange, and yellow!! 

 A few construction books and vehicles decorated the living room as well.

 The kids had sack lunches...just like "struction" workers!! 

Adults had pizza and iced tea.

The birthday boy with his cupcakes. The kids had mini cupcakes and popsicles...

all made in peanut free facilities. Adults had an Oreo ice cream cake.

The happy birthday boy thanking guests for his gifts!! 

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Also in July, Brack got to fulfill a dream he's had for a while...

getting to drive an awesome and powerful sports car!! 

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In August, my sister-in-law Jana came with her three kids and we had three days of non-stop go-go-go!! One day at the zoo, one day at the botanical gardens, and one day at Sealife Aquarium and Legoland!! Here are a few of the pics from those crazy busy days!!

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How's that for a recap of mid-July through mid-August? I will be posting several times over the next few days to get all caught up...cause there were a LOT of pics in this post!! 

Where to start?

How in the world do you start back at blogging again after such a long hiatus? Do you start right in with current events and just pretend you've been blogging all along? Do you do as best of a recap as possible without boring people with paragraph after paragraph? Or do you do some kind of hybrid...where you jump right back into blogging, but as various things pop up in your posts you kind of go off on short tangents to explain what the heck all of that is about?!! EESH!! I have no clue...so I will just muddle on through and try to get back in the habit of blogging as best I can.

Right now I am in the middle of planning a birthday party. Said birthday party is supposedly for both Bug AND Brack...but since Brack really doesn't care and Bug specifically requested a "Mighty Machines" birthday party...well, there ya go!! Construction themed party it is!! I've got black tablecloth and plates, orange cups and napkins, and yellow utensils. There will be balloons of yellow and black, streamers of orange and yellow, and construction books and toys scattered about. If we are lucky we will score some orange cones from our town's public works department (the only thing they will loan for a 3 year old party for fear of sharp edges...haha). Hopefully Brack will score some old blueprints and caution tape (and maybe even some orange plastic construction fencing) from his work. More details to come in a post-party post...with pics!!

Anyway, it is a bit busy around here right now, to say the least!! Gotta get the house straightened and actually CLEAN...as in scrubbing things...something this chica really is not into!! I love things neat and organized, but please don't come by for a white glove inspection!! I hate mopping, hate dusting, hate turning the broom upside down to sweep cobwebs down from random high corners!! But...it must be done before Saturday and the party!! Then Sunday evening we are hosting our missional community thing at our house...so party stuff will have to be cleared out quickly, but at least I will only have to SCRUB once...haha!!

Next week is all kinds of busy, with something every night of the week...swim lessons three evenings, informational meeting about foster adoption another evening, and a thing another evening with a guy who is gonna share practical tips about living missionally!! Then we actually get to put that into practice on Saturday as we go and pass out breakfast tacos to the homeless!! Of course, both Sunday mornings we have church...and both Sundays are Brack's weeks to run sound!! Whew!! I think when the 23rd rolls around we will sit back and take a deep breath and be thankful that all we have that week are swim lessons...haha!!

So there ya go...a brief peek into what's up at my casa at the current moment. I will attempt to try to catch up on all the events of the past FOREVER as I can...but this is what I've got tonight!!

A Year of Tears

This is going to be a hard post for me, so please bear with me. I don't know how many of you have noticed the little tickers at the bottom of the page, but here is the story of the ones on the bottom right side.

Last year in mid-February I suspected I was pregnant...and even told my sister so when I got the news that she and my SIL were both expecting...but it was too early for me to test. As soon as I got within the time frame to test though, I took a test and it was positive. Two days later I lost the baby. This was a blow for me since this was my first loss and I guess I never thought it could happen to me. I named the baby Riley and cried a lot but soon set my heart on trying for another one. Particularly hard was the fact that my sister lost her baby two days after me and my SIL ended up losing her baby in May...far enough along to know it was a baby girl.

It took us a few months, but by Brack's birthday in July I knew I was pregnant again. I was able to surprise him in a very fun way by writing "Big Brother" on a t-shirt and putting it on Bug and having him run into the room where Brack was and hand him the positive pregnancy test. We were happy and I was only slightly nervous. After all, the loss I'd had was so very early and so very common. I started to breathe a little easier as the weeks went by...but still planned on waiting till eight weeks to tell certain friends and until twelve weeks to tell the internet at large (as in Facebook and blog friends). At the beginning of August, at almost eight weeks, I started spotting and got really nervous so we went in for an early sonogram...where I saw our tiny little one with a heartbeat. I started on progesterone to hopefully help me hold onto our precious tiny one..but somewhere between eight and nine weeks our baby was gone. I named that little one Paisley and spent a lot of time crying...enough to make Bug become more of a hugging little dude because he didn't like to see Mama sad. Hard in a different kind of way was the fact that another SIL and I were due within days of each other and I got to see her belly grow while mine did not. Her new little dude was born a few weeks ago and is such a cutie...but it's still hard!!

After that, we for sure were not planning on getting pregnant again for a while...but had a surprise the end of September when I discovered that I was expecting yet again. This time I WAS nervous!! However, I didn't have a lot of time to dwell on it at first because the first week of October we had a sad and scary surprise of a different nature. Our cute little Bug had an anaphylactic reaction to peanut butter and we had to rush him to the ER where they pumped his little body full of stuff to stabilize him and then sent us via ambulance to the children's hospital where they kept him overnight for observation. Poor little dude was really freaked out!! Once he was stabilized and we got home it was then time for Mama and Papa to start freaking out about clearing the house of nuts and keeping anything that could even be cross-contaminated far, far away from our little guy to prevent that from happening again!! We now carry around a case with epi-pens and Benadryl and Bug has a couple of medical alert bracelets and a "Don't Feed Me" button to warn others not to share food with him. It is definitely a game-changer in our lives now...but of course he is worth it!!

So, back to this surprise pregnancy. I went through the month of October with the various symptoms of pregnancy (needing the bathroom a lot, hungry but queasy, etc.)...but I was scared because I kept spotting. It was always light and would go away, but a few days later would be back. Finally, in early November we went for a sonogram at nine weeks...just to make sure everything was okay. In that room, from a nurse who didn't seem to care that she was breaking our hearts, we were told that our baby wasn't even there anymore. It hadn't developed much past implantation. The placenta was the right size and firmly implanted...which was why I had all the symptoms of pregnancy...but my baby was probably already gone by the time we were rushing Bug to the ER!! We named that baby Waverley and again I cried and cried. How very unfair life seemed/seems!! Oh yeah, and my baby sis is expecting...within days of when Waverley was to be due this June!!

Needless to say, after all that happened last year (as well as the complications we had surrounding Bug's birth...which you can read about here and here) Brack was rather opposed to trying again...soon, if ever!! I convinced him to wait to talk about it further until we were past all the should-have-been due dates...which would mean June or later. Even then I felt like that there was still maybe a possibility that we could try again for just one more baby!! We got through the holidays and January with a couple ear infections for Bug and GERD for Brack to deal with...so that wasn't too fun, but still easier to deal with than the miscarriages in any case.

Then we got to February. I had been going in every few weeks to have my blood drawn and tested to make sure my HCG levels were dropping consistently after the last loss. The end of January the midwife office called and said I needed to come in, since my HCG had only dropped five points in three weeks time. At that time we discussed with the doctor what was going on. Evidently my body was still retaining that placenta and that is why my HCG was not dropping. He suggested a D&C to clear it out so my body could recover and get back on track...but he suggested waiting a bit to see if my cycle would come back and flush it out on its own before we did the surgery. Since five days later I did start my cycle, I figured that would take care of it.

But it didn't!! Three days after I started my cycle I started hemorrhaging. We made it to the ER as fast as we could, but I lost a LOT of blood and ended up crashing three times in the ER. All I could think about in there was how I really needed to make it for my little Bug!! At that point I knew that it was crazy to keep trying for another biological child. My body just can't seem to handle it and I do NOT want to keep making angel babies or put my life at risk any more. My husband and little boy need me to stick around and that trumps any desire to grow another little one inside my body.

All that went down in February. Since then I have been recovering, getting my strength back, working on getting the house decluttered, and spending time with my adorable little boy that I DO have with me here on earth.

So there you go. The reason my blog has been so silent for so long. I will come back later with posts about the other things that have been happening the last year or so. This just deserved its own post and the first post back.

Please, pray for me. I may put on a smiling face and look like everything is going fine and most days it is. But I still have dark and sad days mixed in there too. A prayer, a hug, a phone call now and then would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!