INCONCEIVABLE: Rachel Week!

Written by Rachel

It's Rachel Week! It's kind of like Shark Week, but 100 times less cool and exciting (is there anything cooler than Shark Week?? I think not)...so no, I guess it's nothing like Shark Week. But I'll at least make it more interesting than Watching Paint Dry Week :). So for all 2 of my readers, I will try to catch up a little to where I am today (even though I know I will still be way behind...let's be honest, I won't even get close), and maybe I'll even try to throw in some 'getting to know me' stuff so people who actually don't know me can get to know me a little more personally (although I don't know how much more personal you can get than hearing about someone's experience during labor and delivery, getting manhandled by doctors, etc.) I always like to learn about the bloggers themselves so I know who I'm reading about...it helps me relate to them better. So, here goes!

My first post of the week is a journal entry I wrote about 4 months after I lost Maddox and Sampson. I'm not even going to edit it and make it sound more professional, so ignore how amateur my writing is...I was just trying to throw my thoughts out in a hurry, and I'm pretty sure it was late at night, which is a recipe for poor grammar and elementary school depth :) But you'll get the general idea of my feelings around that time period.

March 11, 2013

I would be in my 36^th week with Maddox and Sampson right now. With twins, getting to 36 weeks is really the goal because anything past that is really just bonus time. So March 7^th was kind of their due date. It’s strange thinking that if they were still here, they would probably be joining our family any day now. I was looking at Harper (my little girl) the other morning and thinking how grown up she looks and how much she is already ready for a sibling (or two!). She is almost 22 months, just 2 months away from being 2 years old. I can’t believe it! People weren’t lying when they said how fast time flies with your kids. Harper is still my little baby, but she is getting so big! It gave me a little pang of guilt thinking how ready she is for a brother or sister and that she could have had 2 little baby brothers right now. Now the earliest she would get one is when she is over 2 ½ years old. Seems so far away. How perfect it would have been to have Maddox and Sampson with us right now. Harper can pretty much do her own thing during the day. She plays with her toys, reads her books, feeds herself (and her clothes and the floor), and we can carry on little conversations and communicate with each other pretty well. She is a great talker, and I can pretty much understand what it is she is asking or telling or showing me. She is a smart little cookie. She runs around and pulls herself up on all the furniture and gets down without falling. She isn’t so dependent on me for every single thing during the day, so having my 2 babies right now would have been absolutely perfect. I know Harper would have loved them to pieces. She would have wanted to help with everything. It makes my heart ache just thinking about what could have been at this exact moment.

We went to our neighbor and good friends' house, Paul and Alli's, the other night, and while all the guys ran to a store, Alli and I stayed back at her house and just chatted. We hadn’t talked about Maddox and Sampson for a while, probably since back in November. But I think she was following a prompting to ask me how I was doing because I’ve been thinking about my boys a lot over the past little while since they could have been born any day now. She asked how I’ve been doing lately, and I don’t know why, but tears just welled up in my eyes and I told her that they would probably be born right about now. She started crying with me and said how sorry she felt for me, how she’s been meaning to ask me how I’ve been for a while but hasn’t known how to bring it up. She said she’s been thinking of me a lot lately. We talked and cried for a few minutes together about it. I felt bad just letting the waterworks loose, but I couldn’t help it. It meant a lot to me that she still thought about my boys and me and cared about how I was feeling. It makes it real to me again when someone talks about it, because sometimes it still feels like it was just a dream and my boys were gone in the blink of an eye. Of course I know it was real…I still think about Maddox and Sampson every day and think about what I would be doing if they were still here. I think about them the most when I am with Harper and I feel the guilt and sadness realizing what she could be experiencing with them. I feel guilty thinking that I somehow robbed her having her baby brothers right now, even though I know I couldn’t have done anything differently and that it is just part of Heavenly Father’s plan. I think I will always have this guilt and heavy burden on my shoulders until we are able to have another baby. I will still wish I had Maddox and Sampson, but I think that will ease the pain a little bit. Harper just keeps getting older and bigger and it feels like the time is shooting past us, and there is nothing I can do to slow it down.

My doctor said to wait at least 6 months before trying to get pregnant again, but even these 4 months since I lost my sweet boys has seemed like an eternity. It eats me up inside. I am just finishing up my last round of birth control before needing to go get a refill, but I don’t think I will get it. I just feel like I can’t wait much longer, and if I get pregnant soon, then it’s meant to be, and it might take a couple months anyway. At least, I hope that it will only take a couple months max to get pregnant again. That is one of my fears…that it will take longer and that Harper will just get older without having a close buddy to grow up with. I pray every day that Heavenly Father will bless us with a new little angel in our family soon for Harper. The thought consumes my heart every day. I just have to have the faith that Heavenly Father knows what is best for me and that He is mindful of the heaviness and emptiness in my heart.

I think I will start making plans to do some sort of memorial, maybe just with Harper, Matt and me on April 4^th, on Maddox and Sampson’s technical due date. Maybe send some blue balloons up in the sky with little messages to Maddox and Sampson telling them how much we love and miss them. We never did any sort of memorial, and I think I need something like this. And I think it would be good for Harper because she is still too young to understand what even happened. But I want her to know about and never forget her 2 little angel brothers. I sure do love and miss my boys.

The following are all pictures taken around this time...