Hopes and Dreams and Baby Things

I'm going to be a grandma!

I love babies, and toddlers, and children, and even teenagers most of the time. 😆 I've spent my whole life surrounded by children! My nickname is the Baby Whisperer! I mean, this is going to be awesome!

What an exciting time for us, filled with hopes and dreams and baby things!

Tiny shoes for tiny feet. 

Tiny mittens for tiny hands. 

Tiny diapers for tiny bottoms.

Tiny clothes for tiny humans.

Tiny everything!

I started thinking right away of how to rearrange my home to MAKE WAY FOR GRANDKIDS! What contraptions would I buy so that everything doesn't have to be lugged over when they visit? I began checking all the local resale sites for the big ticket items I knew we would need. I even started buying $10 Target giftcards here and there so that I would have money saved up to spoil the baby when it arrives. 👶👶👶👶👶👶👶

Then we discovered something was wrong with baby.

That was a hard day.

Watching my daughter deal with the knowledge that this baby might not make it is one of the single hardest things I have ever walked through. As a mother, I want to make her world safe and happy. But I could not save her from this. And I couldn't really even share the burden - because nobody can really share the burden of a mother knowing her child is fighting for its life.

We cried out to God to save this sweet baby, we asked friends to join us in prayers for a miracle, and we clung to fragile hope and tentatively began to plan all the "what ifs" we could imagine.

Over the next few weeks, we stifled the urge to buy those tiny baby things as the risks of miscarriage tried to overshadow everything, and the experts seemed to hold out such little hope for a positive outcome. Additional testing revealed a chromosomal abnormality, but not the fatal ones we were so afraid of that are fatal. We were delighted to be presented with the best case scenario at this point, after so many weeks of so little optimism from doctors! This baby could live!

But things are still frightening.
The things that are wrong are still high risk. And baby is still fighting for her life!

I'm a really practical person. Early in life, I learned to weigh everything, plan as much as possible, and stuff emotions until I absolutely have to deal with them. I hope for the best and plan for the worst, as I wrote recently here on my blog.

Yet today, my heart cracked again when I heard my daughter say when offered free baby things for her tiny blessing, "we don't know if we'll have a baby at the end of this."

Friends, how awful to spend every moment with a life growing inside you, knowing it could be wrenched away by some biological anomaly? How horrific to want to hope and to dream and to buy all the baby things and know that it might not be part of the plan?

I have miscarried. And it was awful. But it was sudden and spontaneous, and I didn't know anything was wrong until it happend. I didn't spend weeks bonding with the tiny person inside me, dreaming of life as a mother, while also wondering if the baby would survive. All at the same time, moment by moment, twisted together trying to steal my joy.

So for now, we aren't buying tiny baby things. We aren't scheduling the baby shower or registering for gifts. We are hoping and dreaming of a beautiful blessing hanging on to life against the odds. And I guess we will buy the tiny baby things when that time comes. God willing.