Superbowl

We watched the entire Superbowl this past Sunday for the very first time. Alice insisted on it. Since Uncle Ron and Aunt Bonnie visited in early January, she has been all about the Packers. Of course, she was calling them the Blue Bay Packers because she had just read a book called The Mystery of Blue Bay...

I asked her why she was so excited about the Packers and she said, "Steelers steal things. Besides, I'm a cheesehead! Except my head isn't really made out of cheese. That would be weird."

We let her watch until half time. She was really into it - she especially liked the "female" players with long hair. She was elated Monday morning when I told her that "her" team had won. And then she was disappointed when I told her that was it for football until the fall.

Ah well, there's always hockey.

New KSO blogger!

I'm happy to report that the long dormant blog at the KSO - which I used to author - has been taken up by my colleague Andy! Andy is the principal cellist and I've played in a string quartet with him for 10 years. I'm interested to see what he has to say about music and life in the KSO.

He put his first blog up yesterday: www.knoxvillesymphony.blogspot.com

Lovely Parting Gifts

I had my post-op appointment yesterday. It was a super fast appointment that took forever. 90 minutes in the office for 5 minutes of face time.

I got to see the pathologist report. It was short - less than 10 words.

male fetus
cause of demise: trisomy 20

Trisomy 21 causes Down Syndrome. Trisomy 20 causes miscarriages.

It was random - truly bad luck - and, since I am young(ish), it is no more likely to happen again than it was to happen in the first place.

The whole thing reminded me of Wheel of Fortune where, after not solving the final puzzle, the contestant is shown what they would have won if only they had picked different letters.

A boy. A son. A brother.

We really wanted a boy.

My doctor showed me the report to give us some closure. And you know what?

It has.

What Doesn't Kill You - Part 1

January was a spectacular month for us, and not in a good way. I've gone back and forth about whether I wanted to write about everything that has happened. Miscarriage, for whatever reason, is not something people talk about. If it makes you squeamish you might want to skip out on this.

Right after Thanksgiving I found out I was pregnant. (don't get excited.) As I've shared before, I don't "do" pregnancy well. Actually, that is a gross understatement. Without serious ongoing medical intervention, there is very little chance that I will ever carry a pregnancy past the first trimester. Alice was (is) a miracle.

In the month of December, I saw my doctor 10 times. I had so much lab work done that my one decent vein went on strike. Every day I injected myself with an anticoagulant. When I woke up in the morning I prayed for strength and grace to get through the day and when I went to bed at night I thanked God for another day spent pregnant.

In 30 days I had 3 ultrasounds. The first two left us hopeful; the last, devastated. On New Year's Eve, while people were making merry and counting down to midnight, I was sleeping off the good drugs the anaesthesiologist gave me and wondering what the hell went wrong.

We were shocked and grieving. This is my first miscarriage with my current doctor, but it is officially my 4th. He had started to give me the usual speech about grieving, then paused and said, "Unfortunately you are an expert at this." Indeed.

This is by far the worst loss we've been through. I always thought that having an ultrasound and not seeing anything was the worst thing in the world (at least in the baby-making world). I was wrong. Watching your babies heart flutter at one appointment only to see complete stillness at the next is a pain that is indescribable.

In the days that followed, Tim and I had very little patience for poor Alice. A few days after my surgery I was feeling pretty good physically, so we decided to visit friends in Nashville. They have three busy children and we felt the change of scenery would do all of us good.

A few days into our visit, Alice got sick. She started throwing up and couldn't stop. All day, and all the way home from Nashville my poor girl couldn't keep anything down.

We got back into town and Tim suggested that maybe we should bypass home and take her straight to the ER. From the back seat Alice yelled, "I'm STARVING!!!! Can we please go to the Mexican restaurant and THEN go to the hospital? I want an enchilada."

Surely a child who is requesting enchiladas can't be that sick, right?

Wrong.

First Skirt

Guess what Alice and I did this afternoon?



This is her first sewing project. She did everything except for putting the elastic through the casing - I helped with that because it was a tight squeeze. She even used the serger to finish off the raw edges! She is very proud of herself!



I predict many more skirts in her immediate future....