Let me start by saying that removing soy completely from AJ's diet has worked wonders. We used to give her food with just a little bit of soy in it, like margerine and some GFCF waffles. But I have since discovered then when she has no soy at all, she is "with us" but when she does have soy, like in the GFCF waffles, she is in lala land. I hope that we have found the secret to keeping her vocal and attentive. I will post again and see if this is consistent for more than two weeks.

So I am 27 weeks pregnant today. That is about how far along my older sister was when she came to visit me a few weeks before she passed at 32 weeks preg.

I have been dealing with something really hard core. Her husband told me a couple of days ago that they tried to save the baby. That he was taken from the scene, to the hospital, but he didn't make it. I had always thought that he died with her, in her belly, but hearing this threw me back into terrible grief again. After kind of figuring out how to separate her from the accident, I suddenly had to learn how to separate the baby from the accident and I am still dealing with it, still reeling from how horrible it is.

People say that they believe in angels. Where was my sister's angel? and why wasn't she her baby's angel? I have to figure out how to love the world anyway and the weird thing is, is that I do. I love that she had time with us, more than I hate what happened to her. I know that horrible things happen to people all the time but we always hope that we are exempt and that this stuff happens to other people...that we are the star of the story and they are all the characters that we read about.

But now I know that I could be gone tomorrow, that my kids could loose me or vice versa and I have to learn to not worry about it or I simply have no life. So I have kind of figured out how to go on and be happy anyway. Right now the baby in my belly is kicking away. It brings me so much joy but I am also shell shocked knowing exactly what my sister felt the last few weeks of her life. I also feel like there is this little life inside of me. There is this little personality and I when I feel my belly I can make out a head or a butt or a little foot. With the first two pregnancies it seemed like I had aliens moving around in my belly. This time it feels different. I know that there is a real little baby in there, my little one just growing and chilling out and getting bigger. He/she can even breath on his/her own if born right now. And these thoughts slam me back to my sister's baby. I don't know how long he was alive, if he even made it to the hospital. I think about how someone held him in their arms and it is a stunning thought. I kind of want to know who it was and what color the baby's eyes and hair were. But at the same time I want to leave it be and not ripple the waters more than they are, because no matter how much I find out, the outcome will be the same. I don't know how much more I want in my brain to make stories out of. I don't need any more answers that create more questions than before the answer was given...if that makes any sense.

DH said that he doesn't want me to grieve. He wants me to send "happy hormones" to the baby. And then I feel how unfair it is that I get this chance at being pregnant and having another baby while she was robbed of life and motherhood. I feel like I am stumbling through this in a way, thinking that at any second it could be taken away from me like it was her. Since she was older, i always followed in her footsteps...but not this, not this.

DH plays video games while I tell him about what I have been thinking and how I have been grieving and I cry and he plays video games until I tell him to turn it off and give me a hug. And he does, when I tell him to. I think that I have developed this kind of tolerance of him having no idea how to deal with this, because AJ needs to be told basic social things and I guess she got it from her daddy. So I don't get mad at him for playing video games while I cry about my sister. I just tell him what he can do to help me and when he willingly does it I am amazed at how he is so like AJ. His eye contact with strangers is terrible too. In fact, I can never ask him to get our waiter or waitress in restaurants because he won't look at their faces ever so he can't recognize them to ask them for something.

So a few other things that have slammed me back into grief mode is that I saw a fatal accident yesterday. I just went home and went to bed for 4 hours and made DH come home and watch the kids while I just waited for the shock to go away. Also my sister's husband brought me her sewing stuff. She has these amazing sewing machines, a Surger (which I never knew what one was until he brought it today...even though she had told me all about it before.) And another fancy machine I have no idea how to use. He brought tubs of remarkably organized thread and tubs of fabrics she had collected...some from little stores in her town and some from England when she went there with her husband last year. So now it is all piled in our living room until I figure out where to put it. I was thinking about putting it under my bed but I don't want to have weird dreams. Her husband also brought me her amazing mountain bike that she got when she was in college. The thing is, she would never have let me touch this stuff and now here it is in my shed and living room. My younger sister and my mom are both wonderful at sewing and neither of them want the machines. They can't deal with it. I feel closer to her when I look at her stuff and look at the fabrics and see the little sketches she drew of purses and a dress that she was going to make. I think that maybe I will try to make it in honor of her. My younger sister said she couldn't deal with that and that I can and that I have dealt with it head on right from the beginning. She said she could never had made a photo montage for the funeral like I did. I told her that making that video photo montage of her life was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life and I did it because mom asked me to and I obviously would have done anything for mom at that point...anything. DH helped me with it too when I would break down. My younger sister said that she just doesn't let any of it seep up. I don't really know what that means.

Speaking of my younger sister, she is having her wedding here in three weeks. I will write more about that next time .
me.