Week 1: Letters to my babies, and self portrait.

Dear Vidalia and Donavan,

I don't even know where to begin. I am trying to make my way through this world until the day we can meet again. I love the both of you so much! I miss and think about you every day. There isn't a day that goes by when one of your brothers or sisters doesn't mention you. You are apart of all that we do. I hope you are looking down on us and seeing how even though you are not here in person you are here in spirit.

I thought I would tell you a little about your father and I, some things you would have known as you grew up. We meet online, I know what your thinking, your mommy and daddy had to use online dating to find each other! But it is the best thing either of us have done. We meet online in March 2007, and had our first date in May. On our first date I drove out to your daddy's apartment in PA (since his car wasn't working right) and we went to this little pizza place not far away. After we had dinner we decided to go bowling where I preceded to win all the games we played. It was getting late and since our date was on a weekday we decided to call it a night. I want you both to know, that your daddy didn't even give me a kiss good by!! He leaned over and pecked me on the cheek! That was it!

The following week we made plans for Daddy to come to our house here in NJ. The plan was that he would spend the weekend. It was Memorial Day weekend. We had a great time. He got to meet your brothers and sisters. He meet many of my friends. Come Monday evening when it was time for him to go home he didn't want to go!  I'm not really sure how it happened but he said something about wishing he could stay, and I told him I wouldn't tell him not to, so he stayed! We both knew we loved each other from almost the first meeting. It was love at first sight!

We have been together ever since. We finally made it official on May 22, 2010. We had this beautiful sunrise wedding on the beach on Long Island. It was perfect! You both were there in our hearts! We had this wonderful lady in Australia write your names out in the sand and photographed them for us. We had those photographs blown up and put onto canvas. That way everyone at our wedding knew that you were very much apart of everything we did.

Love ya both! Mommy

These three pictures represent various points through my journey of healing.

The first one is of me holding my beloved Donavan. He was delivered via c-section on September 23, 2009. A mere 21 weeks old. Too little to survive in this world outside my body. (This is the first time I am sharing his picture)

The second picture is the one and only tattoo I have.  I got it as a gift to myself for my marriage to their father.  No one knew about it besides my husband until the morning I walled down to the pier for our sunrise wedding. I could hear everyone gasping as I walked passed them in my long wedding dress with the open back. There was wipered remarks about not knowing I had a tattoo. Even my mother and father were shocked. This is something no one expected from me.

The last picture is one of me from just this week, taken especially for this assignment. As I was thinking about how I was going to do this assignment I tried out various different poses and places. I finally settled on a picture of myself in a mirror. This way I could use my camera in a creative way since it is such a part of my life.

New adventure starts tomorrow!

Tomorrow is the day. They day I start my new adventure of healing through photography. I am very excited and nervous to get started. I am not sure what will happen. How will I deal with all the flood of memories. How will I be able to convey the pain and sorrow I feel. I will I heal and move forward through this time in my life? I guess I will just have to wait and see what tomorrow will bring.

New Adventure

I am going to start a new adventure in the near future. I have signed up for an online photography class that will focus on healing from the loss of a child. Please stay tuned and see what I can do.

DNA

Well we herd from our attorney and it seems that the hospital is considering settling. Settling?? What is that?  We still don't know if what the hospital gave is our daughter or not. Apparently the hospital does not want to do the dna testing to confirm that they in fact they didn't loose Vidalia only misplaced her for over 6 month. So I have decided to have the dna testing done on my own. The first part of the testing is done, they found 11 out of 14 dna markers, now Derek and I have to go and have some swabs done to compare our dna to that of the sample the hospital provided. Should be no longer than 2 weeks and we will have our results.

I just need to know ether way. I want to move on, but not knowing if we have our daughters remains is driving me crazy. I want to bury her with her little brother, Donavan but that is impossible with out prof that she is who we say she is.

More time, time, time, time. Will we have an answer in time? 

Under the tree July 2009

Well I know that it is no longer July, but I was reading some of the older posts and decided this was as good a place to start. I want to get some of what I have been feeling and going through down on paper, and these questions seemed like a good place to start.


Well some background information I think is necessary since I have not really gone into much detail on my blog about my what I have been through. I have 5 very normal and healthy children, my pregnancy's have always been tough on me. But it has always been with me (low blood pressure, low sugar, dizziness, and just plain old tiredness to name a few issues) never anything wrong with the babies. That was until I was pregnant with my 6th child, a little girl we named Vidalia Rose. We lost her when I was 12 weeks into the pregnancy. Though the doctors say she never grew past 7 weeks in size. That was February 14, 2009.

In June I found out that I was pregnant with my 7th child. I had gotten so sick I went to the local ER, there they thought I might have the flu, no negative, strep throat, negative too, meningitis, never able to get any spinal fluid to confirm, so what? The doctor decided to send me for a head c-t scan, but before you go, lets do a quick pee test to make sure your not pregnant. BINGO! They draw some blood to check my hcg levels and they come back at 12. For those who know, anything over a 10 is considered pregnant. What maybe 2 days along, not even long enough to have even noticed a missed period! That fits into some of the symptoms I was having only they doctors though I might be having an ectopic pregnancy. Not much to do but wait and see what will happen, they did ultra sound after ultra sound, but nothing was showing up. I was still too early. Finally after another week of no new symptoms and still not being able to see anything on the ultra sounds the doctors decided I must be having a normal pregnancy, that I must have just had some kind of fluke viral bug.

So I begin my monthly visits to the OB, there they do yet another ultra sound, still nothing. More blood work to see where my numbers are at now. They keep telling me that they need to get up to 2000-4000 before anything shows up on the ultra sound. 4 weeks go by, and now I am there, right in the middle. I hold my breath as the technician starts to scan my belly. There it is, a heart beat! Everything is fine, the baby is right where it is suppose to be. I am able to breath again. Everything goes on like all my other pregnancies, I ask some more questions this time, because of what just happened with Vidalia. All the doctors tell me not to worry, everything is going fine. Fast forward to August. I have made all my appointments, done what the doctors have told me to do, but on August 19 all that changes.

As I am leaving the court house for lunch (why I was at a court house will have to wait for another blog about my ex-husband) I feel this gush of warm liquid coming from in between my legs. I rush to the bathroom not knowing if my water broke or if I peed myself. When I get there I realize there is blood everywhere! Bright red blood, running down my legs and pouring into the toilet. I call Derek and he calls 911. I am taken to the nearest hospital in an ambulance.

I know that I have lost my baby. I was 15 weeks pregnant at the time. I know there is nothing that anyone can do to save my baby. I wait for what seems like a lifetime for the hospital staff to get me down to the ultra sound room. I am crying my eyes out, I just went through this in February! I can't do it again! The technician starts the scan, I can't look at the screen. Then I hear it, thump, thump, thump, thump. She says the baby is fine, everything looks good! The heart rate is good and strong! What, I can't believe this! I was sure I was loosing my baby.


So starts some more visits to the OB, some more testing to see what was going on. The OB looks at the reports from the ER and says "these thing just happen some times, we just don't know why, but there is nothing to worry about". So a couple more weeks pass, I have another ultra sound and the baby again is doing fine.


Fast forward to September 22. My 5 month check-up. I have so many other things going on with 5 kids and Derek and I both full-time students, that I was going to just skip this appointment. I mean everything was fine last week with the ultra sound, they are not going really do anything. I have been through this so many time, why do I really need to go right now? Well it just happened that I decided to go. I had brought Dannick with me instead of getting one of my friends to watch him. He was getting very cranky, it was his nap time. Derek was due to get out of class so I called him and asked him to swing by and pick Dannick up, he could take him home and put him down for his nap.


Derek arrives and the midwife was just getting ready to listen to the heart beat. She says to Derek, "Why not stay a minute and listen to the heart beat, it will only take a moment." Derek agrees. The midwife puts the Doppler onto my stomach and starts moving it around. Nothing, but then every time I have been in this office for this pregnancy no one has been able to hear anything. I am not worried, I tell her even the doctors have to get the ultra sound machine out to find this baby! So she calls in the other midwife and together they start scanning my belly.


There is the baby, see the head. And there it is moving. Scan some more, keep looking. At this point I have seen enough ultra sounds to know something is wrong! That was not the baby moving, that was the placenta, the blood flowing to the baby that was moving. The baby is not moving, there is no heart beat! They send me down to the "better" machine, the one in the office is not very good. Down there they confirm what I knew up in the room.


I lost my baby. Derek and I know that it had to have been recently, since I felt the baby move the day before. I go back up to the OB office and they told me that I needed to check into the hospital, that they would be inducing me to have my baby. It was 1pm in the afternoon, I told them that I had to get my other children from school, I had to find someone to watch them. They gave me until 3pm to come back and start the induction.


Derek and I get back to the hospital just at 3pm and we are immediately shown to a private room on the maternity floor. They start all the preparations, I am scared to death, how can I do this? How can I go to the hospital and have a baby and know that it will not be coming home with me?


At about 5pm the doctor finally comes down to see me. My file was brought over from the office, the doctor looks at it and says, you have had 3 c-sections already? We can't induce you! The hospital will not let us! After all the options were explained to us, we decided to go through another c-section.


It is now September 23 and at 10:45am our son Donavan Alexander was born.


Now to Under the Tree:


How do you see or imagine your baby/ies now that you do not have them with you?

I still feel like I am in a fog. In less than 9 months time I have lost 2 babies. September 23 was Vidalia's due date, and February 14 was Donavan's. I feel in some way that Donavan was sent here to help me deal with loosing Vidalia. We still have many unanswered issues concerning Vidalia.

With that being said, I find myself seeing my little girl, a mixture of me and her daddy, with her brothers and sisters thrown in. I imagine holding her, looking down into her brilliant blue eyes as she is feeding from my breast.Or I imagine her little brother, a perfect copy of his dad with his brown hair and blue eyes laying in bed with Derek and I. Just laying there memorizing every detail of his being. Every freckle, every dimple, everything about him. Then Vidalia comes back into view, she is a toddler now, trying to walk and following all her siblings everywhere they go.


No matter how I see it, it is either one or the other. They never seem to be together here on earth. I only see them together in my minds eye up in heaven. I see Donavan being the protector of his sister.



How did the loss of your last pregnancy affect your choices/decisions about the birth of your subsequent pregnancy?

When I found out that I was pregnant with Vidalia, I had made the decisions to have my tubes tied. I already had 5 children this was to be my 6th and I didn't think my body could handle another one. When I lost Vidalia I said that I could not go through this again, but we did not do anything to stop me from getting pregnant. It was so hard, it is still hard.

Then to my surprise I was pregnant again. Derek and I said this would be the very last time! No matter what happened. This time things were different, I wanted this baby so much. Not that I didn't want Vidalia, it was more that then I wanted to finish school. I wanted to do some things for myself. I had already had 5 children in the last 9 years and 4 of them were born in just the last 5 years. Loosing Vidalia showed me that school can wait, it will always be there.

When we found out that Donavan had passed away, we decided to go ahead with our plan for the tubal. So on September 23, I not only lost my son, but I also lost any future children I could have.

Pumpking Picking

We took all the kids out pumpkin picking today.  We choose to go to a farm not far from where Donavan was buried. It was difficult to think about him not being there. We got him his first pumpkin and brought it to him.

The kids were happy to finally see where he was laid to rest. To tell the truth so was I.

This was the second time we went to visit him. The first time we could not find where he was. We chose to bury Donavan in a veteran's cemetery since Derek is a veteran. This way we knew he would always be with us. The cemetery is very large and it is easy to mistake when looking at the map that we were provided.

We miss you Donavan!

My dearest Donavan

Today I miss you!

It has been two weeks since you left the warmth and comfort of my body.

Two weeks since I held you in my hands.

Two weeks since I looked upon your perfectness. 

Two weeks since I counted all your fingers and counted all your toes.

Two weeks of wondering what happened.

Two weeks of dealing with this pain.

Two weeks of doubting that there is a heaven.

Two weeks of knowing there has to be a heaven.

It has already been two weeks, where has the time gone?

Can it really have been only two weeks?

It seams like a lifetime ago,

Not a mere two weeks

since I saw the wonder that was you.

Today I miss you!

Giving blogging another try

Well I have decided to give this who blogging thing another try...

I started this blog almost a year ago, at the time I was not sure what to do about the fact that here I was pregnant again! I was still in the mist of trying to absorb it all. Dannick was not even 1 year old yet, and I found out that we were to have another one, not like 5 (6 if you count Andrew) kids are not enough! At that time I was just trying to deal with the knowledge that another one was coming.

Now sitting here almost a year later I find it hard to remember what I was not sure about.  I wish I could say that I was sitting here typing this with my little girl sitting on my lap, but I can't. We lost her on February 14, 2009. I wish I could also say that instead I was sitting here rubbing my swollen belly, but I can't do that either. We lost our little boy on September 23, 2009.

So, now this has turned into my journey through this grief and sorrow. I have much more to write about, all that I have been through and all that I will continue to go through, but for now I think this will do.

Thanks for listening

What exactly are you suspost to do with a Blog???

Well I am not sure what you are suppose to do with a blog. Do you just rant and talk about anything?? Well here we go...Let's give it a try!!