One year ago today, we found out I was pregnant.
The sign we are holding says "Hi dad I can't wait to meet you". I had taken the test, found out I was pregnant, and then i made this sign without Mark knowing and then brought it over to him with the positive pregnancy test. He was studying at the kitchen table for a test. I brought a very big distraction :)
We hugged each other tightly and cried with joy knowing that we were going to be parents in just a few months.
But the reality of becoming parents was very different for us than what we had imagined on this day last year. Here we are, without our son. And that makes today a bad day. In fact that's made most of this week very hard for me.
I wanted to share some of what we did do with Declan in the few hours that we had with him in the hospital. They are silly things but they are things that Mark and I had planned to do with him as he grew up, and I'm grateful that even through the pain of that day, we were able to do some things that we can remember and smile about.
A few weeks before I had Declan, Mark found his old Gameboy Advance. Oh the excitement. Mark talked a few times about wanting to play old games with Declan so that he knew the games that Mark had played growing up. While we were in the hospital, Mark was holding Declan and started playing his game. I think it mostly was to distract himself at first but after a few minutes he looked at me and said "I'm playing gameboy with my son." It made me happy that he would still be able to say he got to play a game that he loved growing up with his son. And then it was my turn.
As anyone who knows me knows, I love Harry Potter. Like I'm slightly obsessed. I have all the books on my cell phone on the kindle app and I am always somewhere in the series. At this point I was over halfway through The Prisoner of Azkaban, which has really always been my favorite, because with Lupin and Sirius, Harry finally gets part of the family he would've had if his parents had lived. And that always made me happy. So I put my little boy on my chest and I read a chapter of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban out loud to him.
So to our little boy, we are so glad we are your parents and we miss you every day.
Oh, and I sleep with that baby blanket. Every night.
