In a few days, I am either going to be happy...or annoyed. I told Bill on Thursday that my period was due Saturday, February 14. So we went out to dinner and had our V-day bed fun on Friday. It is Sunday and it still has not come. Yes, I know I'm only 1 day late. But my period in December and January was perfect; it came and went on exactly the days it said it should have on my chart! December 18-23; January 17-22. It was supposed to be February 14-19. *sighs*

Bill said maybe I'm pregnant. A few weeks ago he stopped using the comdoms and has been practicing the pull-out method. So...there is a possibility I'm pregnant. It only took one try both times I was pregnant before. And my period was DUE May 21 when I got 2 BFPs. My period was due June 25 when I got a BFP on June 26. Who knows. But if I'm not pregnant...then I will be annoyed when my period does decide to show up. Cause it messes up my TTC chart and I have to fix it! Argh!!

I had this dream last night. That Roald's gravestone was installed and that it was...WRONG. It was long vertically, but still the flat or flush stone. It was huge, about the length of his grave. Then it said ROALD WALLECE LIGHTNER (should be Wallace) and it was this black stone instead of the grey granite we ordered. And the Precious Moments boy angel was not on it. I was SO MAD.

I am becoming impatient about this stone. It is nice to have something to "look forward to" concerning Roald. So I guess maybe once it IS here, it will be sort of sad. I don't think I ever would have thought I would be "happy" about a gravestone for a baby. I am a little worried, though. Since Roald is no longer on the end of his row, there is a baby grave on each side of his. The boy to the left has gotten his gravestone in and it pretty much takes up the width of his grave. I'd say his stone is about 16" x 18". Now that Allie is buried to the right of Roald...well, we're kind of pressed for space. There is plenty of space to decorate and whatnot. But we ordered a 20" x 24" stone. I originally planned on a 16" x 18", but then the lady told me we couldn't have his full name, date and WE LOVE YOU as well as the carved picture. So we had to go with 20 x 24. I just REALLY hope they fit it in there. If they asked me if they could move him...Ugh, that will be so painful. And obviously they can't move Trent or Allie nor would I want them to. *sighs*

I really hope they install it soon, though. The weather has been perfect for them to do something like that and ALL of the snow is gone. It's kind of freaky to walk outside now and see NO snow. I'm going to the graveyard today. First time in almost 3 weeks again. I hate the waits. I wish I could go every day.

I would have been 37 weeks 1 day pregnant today. Yesterday I wanted to quit the cigarettes in preparation for TTC (trying to conceive) next month. As those of you who know me already know, as soon as my fertile days come around I have no problem quitting. All I need to think about is the innocent baby and that is enough to stop me from this selfish addiction.

Anyway, I was going out to the porch last night to smoke one (I have cut down to only a few a day though versus 10 a day). It suddenly hit me that I can walk normally and gracefully; I shouldn't be walking like that. I should be waddling. I also noticed durng the day yesterday when I looked outside something was different. And I DIDN'T like it. No snow. It's one more thing that reminds me of the last time I had Roald that is going to change, to go away. I don't want it to.

Have I mentioned how much I love "homecooking" lately? I have begun watching the 1980s Strawberry Shortcake videos yesterday while I cook and clean like I used to. Those are so familiar and I have them completely memorized, but they make me feel better when I am feeling down for any reason. I also want more sons, but I can't wait to have a daughter to watch them with! We are totally playing Strawberry Shortcake together! I will go eBay crazy when we find out we are having a girl someday!

I miss Roald so much. I wish I was still pregnant with him. So bad. I guess somedays you dig deeeper, but that is really what it comes down to. Grief can be so bitter and so painful, but usually that is all I say or think: "I wish he was still here." Maybe I'm not making sense. We have 37 more days until we are are going to start TTC again! AF (Aunt Flo) is due in 4 days. I know I hate the way I look and have issues with that but ever since May 21, 2008 when I got that first positive home pregnancy test (I was pregnant with Terry), I've secretly loved my body. Loved the way it works...loved it and felt so grateful I don't have the painful issues some other women have. Even after I miscarried Terry, one month later when I got that positive HPT on June 26 with Roald I loved my body even more. After labor and delivery of Roald I love it even more. I guess some people would rather miscarry than have to labor and give birth to a premature stillborn child, but I am glad I got that experience. I'm glad that, unlike with Terry, I knew Roald's gender; I felt him move inside me; I watched him wiggle around on an ultrasound; I have U/S scans of his body when he was living; I got to go shopping for his baby things; I got to name him with Bill; I got to hear his heartbeat. I am also so grateful I got to further that bond with him by having to labor to give birth to him. How I wish I didn't have that epidural for the final 3 and a half hours of my total 13 and a half hours. The pain and work is what a mother must go through to give birth; to me, it is proof to anyone who counts him as less than live babies or full-term stillborn babies that he was a baby, too. That I am a mother, too. I'm glad that my body losing him was not like it was with Terry: in the bathroom at church, at home, sitting in it in an E.R. bed. I had a suite in the maternity ward, the cart with the plastic baby bed. I had a birth experience. Even though he was dead, I am glad I got to have that. Those memories, painful as they are, are precious to me. They seem to validate my being a mother.

Okay, now I am crying. Time to go make stromboli dough...

Here we are, early February. I'm baking Bill chocolate drops and will make the peanut butter frosting then. It is so strange how the mere thought of food when I was pregnant made me sick (most of the time). Since losing Roald, baking has been almost like therapy for me. The first thing I baked after losing him was peanut butter blossoms (those little peanut butter cookies with chocolate kisses on them). I baked them for Bill on like Monday or Tuesday (had Roald on the Saturday before that).

Even cooking dinners and stuff is fun now. Before I was pregnant I loved baking and making sweet things, but I felt very untalented and lacklustre in cooking breakfast, dinner, etc. But now, like so many other things, making peanut butter blossoms will NEVER be the same. I am considering baking them every time his birthday is around as part of the other things I am planning on doing in memoriam.

I would have been 36 weeks 2 days pregnant today. I need to start getting serious about my exercise routine this month. I gained a good amount of weight in November and December and the first half of Jnauary. Then I began cooking and cleaning alot and I feel myself starving by the time dinner is ready (I'm eating more regularly) and I feel more energized from moving around. So I thin kI have lost a little bit (my rings are even feeling a little loose). I need to start drinking more water and milk, though. And remembering to take a vitamin EVERY day.

I find a LITTLE bit of comfort in that one month from today Roald's due date will be over. But then again, like anything that has to do with him, that also makes me feel like he will be so much more further away.

Bill started his new job Monday and he says he likes it. I feel like he's started a new school and is my kid or something, lol. I can tell we both are acting different with it. I feel more at ease with his steady schedule and not always talking about work. He acts more energized and like when he is home he IS home in his mind, too. I also like that he said there are no naked women calendars hanging up or anything like that there. At his old job I know they were all over and that people would actually stand around talking about stuff like that. And he said he is pretty antisocial at this new job, but that everyone else seems to keep to themselves, too. I hope this job is good for him mentally and emotionally.

I just feel...like really empty. I'm not suicidal or crying all the time, but life just feels boring. I want to have children. I miss Roald. And Terry even. I know dealing with Roald is so much harder, but Terry is always sitting in my heart, too. When I found out I was pregnant with them, it wa spure joy for me and everyone. I told everyone right away. I had no idea anything was going to go wrong. The bliss was really innocent. It wasn't quite like that with Roald. If I told someone I also added that they should keep my pregnancy a secret until after 6 weeks. That feels weird, you know. I don't know if I am going to do that again or not.

*sigh*
Insomnia has never sucked so much. I've had to take sleeping pills every night for the last 3 weeks. I tried a couple nights not to take them and by 2 or 3 in the morning I was ripping them open.

I used to LOVE being up all night-but now it just sucks. I'm still not sleeping upstairs in our bedroom (it just makes me cry) and Bill can't sleep on the sofabed anymore because he tosses and turns all night, so he is sleeping upstairs and I'm down here still.

I wish I had had a baby shower. I wish there had been a joyful day spent with other people celebrating Roald. I'm sitting here crying wishing I had gotten to have one and wondering what it would have looked like.

I've learned it's okay to admit to myself that it is not fair that I don't have Roald. It's okay for me to complain to myself that it's not fair. God doesn't hate me or look down on me for saying it's not fair. Lots of stuff isn't fair. As long as I don't cross the lines of blaming people, being angry with people over losing Roald, saying I wish it would happen to other people, etc. I don't feel or think those ways, but here lately every day seems to remind me even more of just how unfair this is.
I guess other things in my life have been unfair but I didn't let them rule my life. But this feels so unfair-I feel gutted. And the terrible thing I am realizing is that when you lose something that means so much to you-a person you love-knowing and talking to other people who have had the same loss seems comforting, but really it does not lessen the pain. You feel a little less alone but it doesn't fill the emptiness, the void. It's like if you're starving without ANY food and a bunch of other starving people come join you in the same bubble and you see people outside the bubble eating. Some moderately, some gorging themselves. But it doesn't change the fact that all of you in the starvation bubble are, well, starving. You have no food, even though you have each other. Does this make sense?

Bill starts a new job on Monday. I would have been 36 weeks on Monday. We got my prenatal vitamins refilled this week before he switches jobs and losses insurance until May. The new job's insurance is awesome, but it won't kick in until May and I am nOT waiting until May to TTC. So I have 40 prenatal vitamins to take if we get pregnant before I can get to the doctor's.

Okay, this week is really making me feel like s**t. I know it's not really "the week". The fact that I am no longer pregnant, that I am no longer carrying Roald, is becoming too clear. My body feels like an empty vessel. I read birth stories...I look at pictures of pregnant women...I look at pictures of new baby boys...I read other peoples' blogs who are about as far along in their pregnancies as I would have been...And then boom, it hits me. I should be like these people. I should be over 35 weeks pregnant. I should be having a birth story to tell soon (I DO have a birth story, but no one wants to hear a birth story when it ends with a dead baby). I should be so big I am just about ready to pop. I should soon have tons of pictures of every waking (and sleeping) moment of a new baby boy.

Then I feel my soft stomache. No more hard uterus. I see my computer desktop-my son's grave. I eat hot wings...followed by no puking and/or heartburn. Then when I try to assuage myself by saying "Roald will always be gone; you will never see him again in this life, but you will have another baby and hopefully babies, someday; probably not too long from now. They can't replace him and you are already a mother, but you will someday have the joy of raising your children."
Then I think about how long my next pregnancy is going to feel. How many things that should be joyous that are going to be bittersweet. The thing that is probably going to be the hardest or the second hardest is going to be...ultrasounds. And my doctor told us on December 23 that during my next pregnancy I will have more of them. I can only have an ultrasound at the Lebanon office of WHC and all 3 times I had an u/s I went there and it was in the same room. I am thinking that might possibly be because they only do obstetrical ultrasounds in that room.

I'm so scared of just breaking down when having an ultrasound. I'm scared of having a flashback of being all alone, without my husband, in that room, having an ultrasound done because our son's heartbeat couldn't be detected via doppler. Then seeing him dead on the screen. That will be terrible if I have to be in that room again. Labor and delivery will be painful, too. It will be happy and so sad. I just feel so sad about not being able to see who he would have looked like, that he could never look at me. He and Terry are the only people I have ever wanted to look me in my eyes. I wish Roald would have been born alive, even if he would have died. How I would cherish the memory of his cry, the memory of his soft skin. The memory of maybe a look at me.
It just hurts so bad to labor and give birth and not have any baby with you. It's like my labor is invisible to everyone else. I have so many memories of being pregnant and they make me miss Roald. I can remember praying to God thanking him for my ability to be pregnant, to conceive. Even with the sickness every day, I told God it was worth it and it was.

When I am pregnant next time, I know things will trigger memories from my pregnancy with Roald. But he can't be replaced. I will do my best to enjoy that pregnancy with THAT baby, but my first long-running pregnancy will always be when I was carrying Roald. Just like the first time I had swollen breasts that hurt so bad it made me laugh from being pregnant was when I was carrying our itty bitty Terry.

I'm just alone, lonely, sad and pretty miserable. Rambling on and on...

Okay, I am a little annoyed. Somehow when I originally made our new pregnancy plan online I must have selected the year 2003. Grr! So, I originally thought our first fertile round would be the first week of March, but instead, this is what it is:

3/14/09 - First day of your cycle
3/25/09 - A little bit fertile
3/26/09 - Fertile
3/27/09-VERY fertile
3/28/09 - Time to ovulate
4/07/09 - A home pregnancy test may work now.
4/11/09 - End of cycle
4/14/09 - No period? Maybe you're pregnant!
12/19/09 - If you are, this is your approximate due date.

So, we are planning on going away for our first wedding anniversary the 20-22 and we will be following form as we did the first two pregnancies. We find out our fertile round and tack on more days before ovulation and even after (just in case my cycle is a little off or something).

So...March 19-April 1 we will be going like two crazy bunnies!

Today is Terry's due date. I feel more awkward than upset. I know Roald's will be terrible. I felt upset about what today is yesterday, really. I have just been being lazy today and I'm in a bad mood.

Is it March yet??? I just want to be able to get pregnant again. I know no one can replace Terry or Roald and that having more children will not take away the pain of losing them, but just because I've lost my first two children doesn't mean I don't want more. I've always wanted a good number of kids. I'm just ready for that new pregnancy that will hopefully end in happiness and not sorrow.

My life feels so empty; if I had another child it would feel more complete and satisfying. Lord, please help us conceive soon! Make 2009 our year!