In April we found that we would be relocating to another state for my husbands' employer. While we were very excited about this, moving is extremely stressful. It was also a corporate relocation, which is monetarily fantastic, but you have a LOT of people with their 'hands in the pot'. This makes it a LOT more stressful. We had relocation liasons, realtors, inspectors (4 different ones!), loan officers, etc. And everyone wanted to talk to us or have us fill out paperwork or meet with them RIGHT NOW.
3 weeks after we found we were moving, I found that I was pregnant. I'll be honest, I wasn't very happy about this. The timing was awful and I felt terribly overwhelmed. I develop hyperemesis gravidarum when pregnant (the entire 9 months) and just functioning is a trial. My daughter was only 17 months old at the time and I felt pretty panicked when I thought about having a 4.5 year old, a barely 2 year old and a newborn a week before Christmas... mere months after moving to a new place where I didn't know a soul.
I eventually told myself to suck it up and make the best of it. No sense in dwelling on something that I had no control over. Be happy and figure it out as you go, right?
So my husband and I started house hunting and preparing for our move. I was focusing on finding a house that would work for our soon-changing family dynamic and actually started to get a little bit excited about a warm, tiny cuddly baby again.
Then I had my first OB appointment and everything fell apart. I went through the appointment with the usual 'congratulations' at every step and then went for a preliminary ultrasound to confirm how far along I was. All I wanted was to hear that there was only one baby. What I got was far different news.
My baby was anencephalic. You can do an internet search if you'd like, but in short, it didn't have a brain. There was also no heartbeat and it looked as though my baby had died about 5 days earlier - when I was looking at houses and trying to visualize a nursery for my cuddly new baby. I was also 2 days shy of 11 weeks along, which is a bit farther along than normal to lose a baby. I dissolved... and then I drove the 25 miles back to my home to cook dinner, trying all along to keep it together in front of my kids.
The next few days were a blur. I'll spare you the details, but I had to have a D&C (terrifying and heartbreaking), in which they missed some 'tissue'. I then got to experience the horror of a miscarriage anyway - at 3 am, by myself, while my husband was out of town and my children slept.
8 days later was moving day.
I numbly went through the motions of moving my family into a corporate apartment, and tried to quickly claim some semblance of normalcy and peace in my life. Sometimes it was ok, and a lot of the time it wasn't. Over the next 2 months we sold our old home, closed on a new one and moved for the 2nd time in 8 weeks. I also started a new work at home job and got back on track with my sons homeschooling.
We've now been in our new house for 2 months. Our things are unpacked and (mostly) put away. We've fallen back into a routine and life seems comfortable again. My kids love their new rooms, and I love my screened in porch (and the view of my 15 partially forested acres I look out at from it).
I still struggle a bit with the emotions of the roller coaster that the last 6 months has been. I still feel a little beaten up. I do know that everything will be okay. I also know that in spite of the bad that we've gone through recently, I'm blessed. God has been good.
I'm going to jump back into the saddle here again. I enjoy my blog. It brings me happiness to have this little thing that is mine. I have 6 or 7 book reviews coming (a backlog from the last 6 months), so stay tuned.
