18 months.

A year and half. Sigh. How can it be 18 months since I held him? And traced his face and felt his skin? Big, big, sigh. A bit closer to seeing him again, I suppose. I looked at pictures of my other kids at 18 months. They seem so little, but so full of personality. I wonder what Max would be like?

We all wrote messages on a pumpkin and took it to Max’s Park this week. The kids sprayed his stone with water and we scrubbed all the dirt and grime off. Cleaned it up a bit. Brought our pumpkin over and read our messages to Max. Isabelle wrote “Please don’t go, we love you so.” She drew a rainbow with herself underneath it, holding Max. Lincoln mostly just scribbled.

we used the timer on the iphone, the kids thought it was amazing. We took a million pictures.

In related news, October is pregnancy and infant loss awareness month. Which is weird, because I’m pretty much aware of it EVERY month. This time last year we found out we were expecting, just six months to the day after Max was born and died. A whole year has passed, and here we are at the beginning again. I’ve been pregnant 28 weeks out of the last 52… more than half of the year.

A couple weeks ago, they drew 24 vials of my blood and sent them off for every test under the sun. Thyroid, vitamin deficiencies, chromosomes, and all the blood clotting disorders we were discussing. Pages and pages of information came back… but everything was totally normal. I mean, I’m thrilled I’m healthy, but also I was sort of hoping there was something we could say AHA and be able to fix it. We were so convinced I had a problem and formed clots in the placenta, cutting off blood supply to the baby… but that doesn’t seem to be the case. My thyroid is fine. My blood is fine. My chromosomes look awesome and I even got to see what all of mine look like. They look nice. Nice chromosomes.

I sat down with my OB and we had a good talk about everything. The most difficult part moving forward is that we have no idea what caused two second trimester miscarriages back to back, and how to prevent it in the future. So, that is kind of scary. We talked about doing blood thinner shots empirically, like “just in case” but they are sort of risky, especially since I have to have c-sections. We talked about seeing a specialist out of town. We talked about a lot of things. Jazz and I have to decide what to do, and that is tricky, but we are praying HARD about which direction to go. We feel hopeful. It still amazes me that I have two beautiful healthy children here- all babies are miracles. There are so many things that can go wrong, it’s amazing that it ever goes right. Proof of our Father in Heaven, and his plan for us.

Happy 18 months to our Max. Missing you today and always. xo