October 15th: Infant and Pregnancy Loss Awareness Day

“Sometimes I may hold you a little too tight. I may even check on you ten times in the night. Sometimes I may kiss you a little too much. Cling to you, sing to you, tickle you and such. As you grow up, you may notice me kissing your nose, touching your hair, feeling your toes. I may cry when you walk. Laugh when you talk. Scream when you’re late, coming home from your date. I may very often pull you near because I don’t want you to see my tears. I never want you to have my fears. Because I need you to know I hold you so dear. Cause see, I’m not just your mother. A long time ago, I lost your brother.” ~ Pinterst: Wellness Mama, Mama of Angels ? ??

International Wave of Light

This is my first blog post in well over a year. I’ve been a terrible blogger. There’s no excuse. Everything is great, I’ve just been busy with life. I’ve been meaning to write a post for so long now and will soon, but today I just wanted to remind everyone to light a candle tonight at 7pm (in your time zone) for all our babies gone too soon. ❤️ Photo credit: https://pin.it/jyidxo7lhtkg32

Our Miracle Girl’s Birth Story

Baby girl is here and 2 weeks old already! Our miracle girl, Rylee, was born on April 17th at 34 weeks 3 days due to preterm labor pains and a very scary and traumatic birth caused by my uterus rupturing. First and foremost, we are both okay, but it’s a miracle that we both survived. Once again things did not go according to plan. The plan was to have a scheduled c-section 3 weeks early in order to prevent the risk of uterine rupture from the classical incision on my uterus. For those who are not aware, a classical incision is a vertical incision high on the uterus that is usually only used in very urgent situations and with very premature babies. The abdominal incision  (the incision you see on the outside) is low and horizontal, but the internal incision on the uterus is high and vertical. This is the type of incision I had from my c-section with Holdon and the reason I had to have a subsequent, though normal (low tranverse), c-section with Archer.  It is very dangerous to have a vaginal delivery or even any contractions with a classical incision because the incision can split open. The…Continue reading Our Miracle Girl’s Birth Story

Tomorrow

  Tomorrow Holdon would have been 7 years old. How has so much time gone by already? And yet a day doesn’t go by that I don’t remember every detail of that day on April 6th, 2010 like it was yesterday. He shouldn’t have been born that day. He wasn’t due to be born until June 26th. But HELLP Syndrome happened to me and he was delivered via emergency c-section at just 27 weeks, 5 days. I was told I had to deliver immediately or I could die and Holdon was in distress, having not grown at all since 24 weeks. He was severely premature, made even worse by severe growth restriction, and a perforation in his small intestine on top of it all. He had to have surgery at only 1 day old to remove the necrotic tissues of the small intestine that had perforated and was left with only 25%. The odds of survival were stacked up against him from the start. The fact that he lived for 3 1/2 months in the NICU is truly amazing and testament to how strong and amazing our little boy was. Time goes on and a lot has changed. It took…Continue reading Tomorrow

April (Baby) Showers – It’s Freaking Babypalooza

This is a weird post for me to write as I am currently one of them, but I had to write about the explosion of pregnancies and babies happening right now. It doesn’t seem to just be happening to me. Others in our blogging community and also in my rainbow and unicorns mom Facebook group have been talking about it happening in their circle of friends too. It seems like where ever we go, and even when we’ve gotten through it and have our rainbow and unicorn babies either through a really lucky egg, ART, donor eggs, surrogacy and/or adoption, we’re still affected by it. When I had my last miscarriage right before this pregnancy, I must have seen 6 pregnancy announcements or knew of several women who were already pregnant and expecting their second or third baby. It hit me hard. At the time of that last miscarriage, I thought my DOR was getting the best of me and I was going into premature menopause and I truly began to think that I’d never be able to give the miracle toddler a living sibling. Then I became pregnant again with this pregnancy. I found out I was pregnant again…Continue reading April (Baby) Showers – It’s Freaking Babypalooza

Appointment with the Perinatologist

This is just a quick update about my appointment with the specialist on Monday. I am relieved and happy to share that there is low risk of placenta accreta! The placenta is higher up so it’s nowhere near the incision from my standard c-section with Archer, and it’s only partially covering the incision from my classical c-section from my delivery with Holdon. It’s technically an anterior placenta, but it’s leaning towards the side a bit so fortunately only a portion of it is covering the classical incision, and the part that is, is not growing into the scarring at this time and doesn’t look like it’s going to over the coming weeks. This is such a relief!! I knew deep down that I would be okay with whatever we found out as long as the delivery would be safe and baby girl would be safe, but now that I have this good news, I have to admit that I really was afraid for the worst and was dreading the prospect of losing my uterus. I knew that if there was any growth into the scarring and/or my uterus, they would not have taken any chances and a hysterectomy would have…Continue reading Appointment with the Perinatologist

OB Appointment

This is just a quick update to let everyone know that after 2 years and 3 months,  I have finally completed Archer’s birth story. I think better late than never applies here and yet, now that I’ve written it, I honestly don’t know what took me so long! I’m so happy I have finally written it so I never forget the details of that day. If you’re still interested in reading it after all this time, you can find it on the “Our Miracle Boy” page. Also, we had an appointment with my OB yesterday and everything looked good. Baby girl is doing great and still measuring several days ahead. It’s no big surprise since both the hubby and I are tall, but looks like baby girl is going to be tall like her brother. We also have the date set for our c-section delivery. It will be May 4th as we requested. The force will be strong with this one. 🙂 The only possible issue with this day, is my doctor is set to be on jury duty that entire week, but she was firm that she would make this day happen for us. So we’ll be having an…Continue reading OB Appointment

Myhopejar Moved and Updates

This is a quick test. I’m not sure if this is going to work so for all the WP .com readers, if you see this, can you comment and let me know? At the end of the summer I moved myhopejar.com to a self hosted site from WP .com to WP .org. I since then have posted a few updates, but it seems that my posts no longer show up in the WordPress reader feed. I discovered this through communication that I have had with some of you through Facebook and Instagram, but there are some of you who I don’t have contact with that way and I’m hoping to reconnect with. Then I realized I still have a .com account and it seems that I can post from it so I’m hoping that this will publish from WordPress.com and not from my self hosted domain and that this will show up on your WordPress reader feed. If it does, can you please click like or comment and let me know and then if you still want to read posts from myhopejar.com, can you please go to the the link and resubscribe to my blog via email? This seems to…Continue reading Myhopejar Moved and Updates

Another Long Overdue Update

Happy three months into the New Year everyone! I hope 2017 has been good to all of you so far! I have been meaning to write an update for months but somehow the holidays and travel and family visiting got in the way and this blog once again got pushed to the back burner. Since my last post, so many things have happened with this pregnancy and with our miracle toddler too. I apologize in advance for this is kind of a long update… Update About Our Miracle Toddler Little man is now two! Daily life with him is such a blast. He’s so much fun and is such a little goofball. He’s also very much a two year old now and there are definitely a lot of new challenges these days, but for the most part his temper tantrums are very short-lived and are usually resolved with a redirect. When that fails I sit him down and ask him if he’s mad or frustrated. And of course he says yes and then I ask him if he needs a hug and he will usually say yes and then he calms down. Some days nothing works and we ride the…Continue reading Another Long Overdue Update