Due Date

Thank you so much to everyone who sent me a card, a note, an email and who commented on my last blog post. Thank you so much for reading Jacob's story. I know it was long. It means so much that you took the time to read about his life and I treasure each and every one of your comments.

Jacob's due date wasn't as bad as I thought it would it be. I had my moments and I talked to him alot, but I thought it would be alot worse.

I worked on his due date blog post for several hours the night before. I think staying busy helped alot. It also helped that I received so many cards from people (including one from someone that I don't know from Belgium), my sister dropped by with cards from her and my Mom and Dad, my other sister sent me an ecard and my other sister sent a nice text message. It meant alot that they remembered.

I went to bed around 11:30pm on Oct 13th and I just started crying and couldn't stop. It was like one of the cries from the early days, but it still wasn't as bad as one of those. It was close though, it was really close. The only difference was that I didn't have trouble breathing while crying. I cried for an hour and a half, most of that time lying in bed with my head on Ted's chest. Ted said that his heart was breaking for me. I realized after awhile that his shirt was getting pretty wet from my tears. Then I realized that I was starving and got some Rice Krispies, watched Friends and finally fell asleep.

We decided to go to Montreal to get away for a few days. For a few months, I had planned on making and bringing a memory box to the hospital where he was born on his due date for the next family to join the club, but about a week before his due date, I decided that I would just be torturing myself to be on the L&D floor on the day that I should have been there giving birth. I'll bring it by at the end of October, beginning of November. I had also thought about getting a tattoo with Jacob's name on his due date, but I wanted to make sure that I wasn't pregnant so I decided I had to wait a bit longer until I knew for sure either way. I didn't know if my cycle would be mixed up from the miscarriage in August.

My tooth had been hurting for a few days and I kept putting off calling the dentist because I was hoping it would stop, and I was scared to go in case I was pregnant. Well, on Thursday morning I decided that I just had to call. It wasn't going away...sometimes the whole left side of my head hurt because of the tooth. So I called that morning and my dentist answered. I explained everything and he said that I could come in at noon. We decided that we would still go to Montreal after the dentist, so I posted my last blog post and quickly packed. We stopped in quickly at the garden. I felt really bad that we couldn't spend more time there, but at least we went. I ran in and told Jacob how much we love him and miss him.

I ended up getting a root canal. I hadn't seen my dentist since 3 weeks before Jacob died. Ted went in the day after he was born for a root canal and told the dentist then that our baby had died and he said the dentist just looked so sad. He had to sit back on his stool and take a few minutes before he could start Ted's root canal. I love him for doing that. He didn't say anything to me about Jacob when I was there, but his demeanor was different and that was good enough for me.

We drove to Montreal after. By this time, I didn't feel the need to get away anymore, but we had told Ted's Mom that we were coming and I knew she would be disappointed if we didn't go. We got there around 8pm and just stayed at his Mom's house and visited that night.

The next morning, we decided to go to Magog, in the Eastern Townships of Quebec and Ted's Mom came with us. Ted's friend Paul, his wife and their kids live there. It is so beautiful there and we really wanted to see all the trees and the changing colours of the leaves. Unfortunately it rained the whole time. Paul and Sheila had a baby girl on May 9th and named her Clara. Paul emailed us over the summer and invited us to stay with them for awhile and said that he had been thinking about us alot, which was really nice. I don't think he realized how hard it would be for me/us to stay there with a little baby when ours had just died so we just said that we were busy with trying to sell the condo. Also, Paul is black and Sheila is white, so not only would there be a baby there, there would be a baby with the same combination of parents that Jacob has.

We got to their house and saw Clara and she is just beautiful. It wasn't hard to see her, maybe because she is a girl, maybe because she is 5 months old and Jacob would have been a newborn now. Two things were hard: thinking about the other babies I know that should be 5 months old now and when I asked Sheila about her labour and no one asked about mine. If I had been sitting there with a baby in my arms, I'm pretty sure we would have compared our labours down to the last detail. I brought up mine twice when we were talking about hers, but no one asked me any questions and I couldn't tell if I was making them uncomfortable, so I dropped it. It made me sad. I spent 18 hours in labour, I delivered a baby and not a thing was asked about it. I guess that is just a part of life now, until I have a living baby.

I have an announcement, but I am worried about this being a trigger so I'm not actually going to say what it is here. It has been a trigger for me in the past when I read it on others' blogs. You can probably guess what it is. If you want to know, you can check my new blog. I won't mention this again here, so it will still be a trigger-free place for my baby loss Mom friends to read, I hope.

Last Sunday, I saw a white butterfly in our backyard for the first time in a few weeks. Then we went for a walk, and there was a rabbit in our backyard when we got back, but he hopped away before I could take a picture. Then, when we came home again later on after going out again, there were 2 dragonflies playing near our front porch.