I haven’t been around the blogosphere for several months now, but I promise I have a good reason for it! After the Capture Your Grief challenge, I found that I needed a little blogging break. Meditating on grief every day is a really emotionally trying exercise. Then, I got some news that made blogging in general…complicated.

I’m going to put a *TRIGGER* warning for other loss moms reading because I think I would want one. I’m about to write about a new pregnancy and a new baby.

So if that’s not a spoiler, I don’t know what is. Zach and I are expecting a new baby boy in August 2015! We are thrilled (!!!), but the first few months were quite full of fear. As I’ve written in the past, becoming pregnant poses a substantial risk of more loss. There was no way for us to tell until about 12-13 weeks how this pregnancy was going to turn out. Of course, even now at 16 weeks pregnant, there are no guarantees. We are very hopeful for this baby, but we are no strangers to loss. We were fortunate that we know the genetic mutations that Owen inherited from us, so we were able to test for them very early on. I underwent chorionic villus sampling (CVS) at 11 weeks so we could look for those mutations in this baby. While we waited for results, we had two very promising ultrasounds showing normal length long bones and hands with only 5 digits each. Since Owen’s long bones and hands were pretty clearly atypical early on, that gave us some relief. We got our final results at 13.5 weeks which told us this baby is free of EvC! He is a carrier, like us, which should not affect him in any way.

I had (have) a lot of conflicting feelings about pregnancy the second time around, but I think that is another post for another day. In the meantime, here’s our new little nugget: