Happy Moment Monday on Friday!

So I'm doing my "Happy Moment Monday" post today, I know, I know, it's Friday you say!! We are going on a little family long weekend trip to Glenwood. Taking the train...the whole nine yards! Soooo I won't be around Monday and wanted to get my happy moment post in before we left so here are some of our fun moments from this week!

I have been wanting to get a tattoo for a long time so I finally bit the bullet this week...I love how it turned out, I just love it.

While I was on the phone Jaimison told me she was going to use her lizard for a phone and she "called" Grandma Kristi...."Shhhhh Mom, I'm on the phone." Little sassy thing.

These shades just make me happy. :)

Don't let them say...

I found this poem on a blog and thought it was beautiful....

Don't let them say I wasn't born
That something stopped my heart
I felt each tender squeeze you gave
I loved you from the start

Although my body you cant hold
It doesn't mean i'm gone
This world was worthy not of me
God chose that I move on.

Although I've never breathed your air
or gazed into your eyes
That doesn't mean I never was
An angel never dies.

Happy Moment Monday

Here are some of our Happy Moments from this past week....

Spending some time out on the farm....Terry and I went on a date, *GASP* it's been forever! It was so nice...had some sushi, some wine, and an absolutely HIGH-LARIOUS movie, 21 Jump Street! I love my hubby... :)

Jaimison and I went to the zoo and stopped by the bench we are adopting for Harper...it was a beautiful day and we just spent some time eating a snack and just sitting...it was so peaceful. The bench is in the perfect spot. I can't wait to see the finished plaque...I'll keep everyone updated when it's finished.

Who doesn't like pigtail braids?! These braids just make me happy. It's the little things... :)

Jaimison

Absolutely hands down Jaimison has been our saving grace. She is an amazing little girl. She makes us so happy and we are so lucky she is our daughter. She is sweet and sassy and so smart. One thing we have really noticed since Harper passed away is that she is so empathetic...she is really intuitive. She knew "mommy had a baby in her belly", but I was never sure how much she really understood. When we came home from the hospital and she saw us crying and upset she knew something was wrong. We were very honest with her about what happened and that it was okay for us to be sad about missing Harper because we wanted Harper to be apart of our family. She had named Harper "Cupcake" and she says she misses Cupcake a lot. Jaimison is a thinker and she will bring things up she had clearly been thinking about. While laying in bed looking at the glow in the dark stars on her ceiling she asked me, "Mom, what is heaven?" Such a hard concept to explain to a three year old, but she really wanted an answer. One of my besties had shared a really thoughtful explanation of what heaven could be with me and I shared it with Jaimison...."look up at the stars and the sky...
only its NOT the sky or the starts, but a giant silk blanket and to give us hope little angles have poked holes in the blanket and that LIGHT we see on earth shinning through is HEAVEN. We just get to see tiny pin holes because if we saw how truly wonderful it was, none of us would want to be stuck on earth anymore." I did a little preschooler editing with her, but she seemed to understand this explanation.

Yesterday we were cleaning out some closets and we came across all of our little momentos we have of Harper. The nurses gave us some imprints of Harper's footprints and Jaimison loves to look at them and touch them....after looking at them for a while she looks at me and says, "Mom...I want to visit heaven." She kind of caught me off guard so I thought for a minute and told her we couldn't go to heaven because it was really really far away. She looked at me again and said, "But mom, we could take a plane and get there!" This broke my heart....a lot of the hardest moments I have had since we lost Harper have been when innocent little Jaimison has just been so honest and open about her feelings. I'm so sad she won't have Harper as her little sister...I'm so sad she doesn't get to be her big sister. We always thought she would be a great big sister and now I know for certain that when we do get lucky enough to bring a sweet little baby home someday that Jaimison will be the best big sister ever!!!!

Happy Moment Monday

Here are some of our fun moments from this past week! :)

Happy Moment Monday

Here are some of our happy moments from last week! :) I love staying home with Jaimison and making an effort to capture these moments has been really great for me....

There are always happy moments with Happy Cakes!

We spent a lot of time at the parks around our house...thank goodness for nice weather!

Jaimison started soccer classes this past weekend and holy cuteness! She had a great time and Terry and I had a great time watching her! I can't believe she is so grown up!!!! :)

We headed to the zoo to visit the animals and we couldn't pass up the carousel. We also wanted Jaimison to help us finalize our decision for the bench we are adopting in honor of Harper. It was a great family moment...

Dear Harper...

I miss you. I think about you every moment of everyday. I wish I knew why you weren't able to stay with us here, but I hope you are somewhere more beautiful and more peaceful. I hope you know how much we love you. My heart aches for you. I wish things could be different and I could hold you in my arms and kiss your sweet face. I wish so many things for you my baby girl, for us. We will love you forever...

What Makes a Mother

What Makes a Mother

I thought of you and closed my eyes.
And prayed to God today.
I asked what makes a mother and
I know I heard him say,

A mother has a baby.
This we know is true.
But God, can you be a mother
when your baby's not with you?

Yes, you can, He replied
with confidence in His voice.
I give many women babies.
When they leave is not their choice.

Some I send for a lifetime
and others for a day.
And some I send to feel your womb
but there's no need to stay.

I just don't understand this. God,
I want my baby here.
He took a breath and cleared His throat
and then I saw a tear.

I wish I could show you
what your child is doing today.
If you could see your child smile
with other children and say,

"We go to earth to learn our lessons
of life and love and fear.
My Mommy loved me, Oh so much,
I got to come straight here.

I feel so lucky to have a Mom
who had so much love for me,
I learned my lesson very quickly.
My Mommy set me free.

I miss my Mommy, Oh so much,
but I visit her each day.
When she goes to sleep,
on her pillow's where I lay.

I stroke her hair and kiss her cheek
and whisper in her ear,
'Mommy don't be sad today,
I'm your baby and I'm here.'"

So you see, my dear sweet one,
your children are okay.
Your babies are here in MY home
and this is where they'll stay.

They'll wait for you with ME
until your lesson is through.
And on the day that you come home,
they'll be at the gates for you.

So now you see what makes a Mother—
It's the feeling in your heart.
It's the love you had so much of,
right from the very start.

Though some on earth may not realize you are a Mother,
until their time is done.
They'll be up here with ME one day,
and know you're the best one.

Happy Moment Monday

So I know that last post was quite the downer and I wanted to separate these posts because this is important. We lost our little Harper much much too quickly. My Grandma actually sent me a quote that I feel perfectly portrays how I'm feeling....

"A mother's love cannot be measured by increments of time...

an entire lifetime of love can be squeezed into a few brief

miraculous moments when necessary"

I love this. I'm also so incredibly blessed to have the most thoughtful, empathetic, beautiful, adventurous, sensitive, loving little girl to call my daughter too....my Jaimison. I'm taking an indefinite amount of time off of work to spend time with Jaimison and work on putting myself back together again. Today we walked to the park and played in the beautiful sunshine. We had so much fun together and I started to think again about how lucky I am to have Jaimison and Terry and all of my amazing family and friends. Through all the awfulness that has pushed its way into our lives I can't forget about the sunshiny moments. Harper wouldn't want us to. So I decided to institute "Happy Moment Monday." I'll be taking at least one picture a day of some happy moment that happened that day, I'll post all the pictures on Monday. So to start us off I'm going to post a picture of a happy moment that happened today at the park.

xoxo,

Bri

Today was supposed to be...

Today was supposed to be our anatomy scan. We were supposed to see a perfectly healthy baby and find out if we were having a boy or a girl. Instead we found out we had a beautiful baby girl moments after we lost her. This was not supposed to be how things went. Life is so unfair. I hate this. I'm terribly angry. I'm sad. I feel tremendous guilt. I'm grief stricken.

Seeing Some Sunshine Through the Rain...

Once we got home from the hospital we weren't sure how we wanted to honor Harper. We did some research and decided we wanted to adopt a bench at the Denver Zoo. The zoo and animal conservation has always been important to us and would have been a big part of Harper's life like it is now for our family so this decision just made sense to us. This way if any of our family and friends want to visit the bench they can...we go to the zoo so often we thought it would be a great way for Jaimison and any other kids we have in the future to remember their sister too. We get to pick out the sight of the bench and then have something nice engraved on a plaque as well. I have been posting on a message board with some wonderfully supportive ladies that have gone through similar situations as us and I found a stanza of a beautiful poem posted by one of these ladies.....we know we want the plaque to have Harper's name on it and then maybe this stanza...

" I felt your touch in the sun today

as its warmth filled the sky;

I closed my eyes for your embrace

and my spirit soared high"

I think this is beautiful and so fitting to how Terry and I feel.

I have so many things I want to do to memorialize Harper and pay tribute to her perfect little soul....we will be getting this bench, I want to get a tattoo, we want to start raising money for the March of Dimes and do the March of Dimes walk in Denver on April 28th, I want to start training for a half marathon....all these things sound like great ideas and ways to help me show Harper how much we love her, but none of these things will bring Harper home. That's really all I want. I just want to hold Harper in my arms. I just want Harper home with our family. That's when the heart break really settles down deep in my heart. When I remember that Harper will never be home with our family and I will never hold her perfect little body in my arms. I will never hold hands with her and I will never get to kiss her good night. These are the things that really stop me cold. That really truly break my heart. I miss her so much already.

The Worst Day of my Life.

I'm starting this blog as a way to work through and process everything that has happened to us in the past week. I also wanted a way to share our story with our family and friends and maybe help other couples going through something similar. I want everyone to know ahead of time that my posts will be honest and candid about what happened. This...is our story.

Last Friday, February 24th, 2012 started like any other day. I woke up, got ready for work, and stopped at Starbucks, like I always did on Fridays. I ran to the bathroom right before my students were due to arrive and noticed some weird discharge. Since it was Friday I decided to call my doctor, they decided to error on the side of caution and told me told come in. I got someone to cover my classroom fully intending to be back within a couple hours. I was worried, but really never thought anything was truly wrong.

After arriving at my doctor's office, we listened to the baby's perfect heart beat. Since I hadn't had any pain or real reasons to worry the doctor decided to check my cervix. That is when we discovered that somehow my cervix had dilated 2 cm. My doctor was very concerned and was blunt in telling me that this was not good. She sent me to the high risk doctor's office that was across the hall where I was told they would do an ultrasound to determine what was going on with my cervix. Everything looked perfect with the baby. Unfortunately they could see the amniotic sac sinking through my open cervix. This meant that my uterus, amniotic sac, and the baby were being exposed to bacteria. The high risk doctor conducted an amniocentesis so they could test the amniotic fluid and determine if there was an infection. This could go two ways...if there was not an infection they would insert a cerclage into my cervix (essentially stitching my cervix closed until closer to my due date, where they would then take out the cerclage) OR if there was an infection the pregnancy could not go on. I would have to deliver the baby. Now at this time I was desperately wishing for the first option. I wanted everything to be okay with both me and baby. Unfortunately after several excruciating hours we were told that there was an infection. This would mean that the doctor's would induce me into labor where I would have to deliver the baby, the baby would not survive at 19 wks. We were going to lose the baby. Terry and I were beside ourselves. I couldn't believe this was happening. I did everything right. I took care of myself and my baby. I protected my baby from everything I could in every way that I could.

I was induced and given an epidural as soon as I felt uncomfortable. I hated everything about this. I just kept thinking about all the pain and how when I was in labor with Jaimison it was all worth it because we knew we were coming home with a baby. This time we knew we wouldn't be coming home with anything. Our baby wouldn't live past the labor and delivery. Our doctors and nurses were amazing during this incredibly difficult situation. They comforted us and prepared us the best they could for what would happen. At the beginning we didn't want to know if the baby was a boy or a girl, we weren't even sure we wanted to see the baby. Our doctor really talked candidly with us about how important it would be for us to see OUR baby and hold OUR baby and name OUR baby. I was terrified. I was frozen with grief. I didn't know how I would go on.

After six painful hours our baby girl was born into this world, we named her Harper Corrine. She would only be with us for a moment, but her footprints will forever be on our hearts. I'm so happy we decided to see and hold our baby. I was so worried about seeing her....but she was perfect. Harper was perfectly beautiful. The first thing we saw was the resemblance to Jaimison. Harper had the most perfect little nose, she had Jaimison's nose. She had all her fingers and toes and beautiful little ears and a perfect little mouth. We cried. We held her. We told her we loved her. We told her she would never be forgotten. Our hearts were broken.

This will forever be the worst day of my life. The day our daughter, Harper Corrine, went to heaven.