One

One year ago this morning I gave birth to our first child. Our Jude dude. I lay in the hospital room watching the sun come up on the darkest day of the year holding my lifeless son in my arms. We spent most of the day with him, trying to make as many memories as possible. 

Then we said goodbye.

I can't believe it's been a year. I can still feel the numbness in my legs from the epidural. I can still see the hollow look in Jess' eyes as he tried to smile for pictures. I still feel the barely-there weight of Jude on my chest, as I closed my eyes and wished and prayed that when I opened them he would be pink and breathing. I still feel the inside-out emptiness of leaving the hospital with flowers and well-wishes instead of my baby.

But I feel other things too. I feel Jude's brother hiccuping inside me. I feel the silky fur of a snuggly puppy beside me. I feel the love of family and friends like a warm blanket wrapped around us. I feel the presence of the Prince of Peace in my home. I feel the hope of joy for tomorrow.

I still feel all the pain of this year without my Jude,...

But I also feel the love, peace, and joy that has been poured out on us from above and from those around us. 

Happy Birthday Jude.

I hope someone up there bakes you a cake.

 I love you sweet boy.

Messy

The last few weeks have been hard. Harder than I even anticipated. 

As Jude's birthday gets closer and closer I'm getting more and more emotionally fragile.

I hate being emotionally fragile.

That's not my normal.

But, it is my "grieving normal."

And I guess for now my "grieving normal" is going to be my normal again.

My "grieving normal" means I'm tired all the time. It means that working 10 or 11 hour days is starting to feel super overwhelming. It means that the comments I get all the time about this being my first baby are harder to shrug off than they have been. It means all Peter's kicks and wiggles make me smile initially because I LOVE feeling him; but then want to cry because I never got to feel Jude like this. It means I miss all my Parker friends so badly because they walked through the journey with us, and they "got it" more than most people do. It means that though I want desperately to be able to focus entirely on preparing for Peter and celebrating his life,... that's only one piece of my reality.

I want to be giving you all happy pregnancy updates. And there are moments when I sit down here prepared to do so,... I even start uploading belly pictures and the like,... But it's just not what comes out when I start writing. What comes out is the mess.

And what a mess it is! What confusion of being so grateful for so much, while also struggling with the messy reality of loss. The beautiful gift of little Peter, is only more precious to us because we're living in the messily-wrapped reality of missing Jude.

So I guess instead of trying to sort through my mess and present only one organized piece at a time, I'm just going to present it to you as is.

Here are a few snapshots of my mess:

We know it's going to be super important to us now and in the future to involve Jude in our Christmas traditions; especially since he was born so close to the holiday. One we are starting this year is that we are going to buy an angel ornament every year. We will wait to hang all the angels on our tree on his birthday.

Here's the ornament we got last week,.. sitting on the counter waiting to be hung next week.

Another tradition we want to have Jude represented in is our stockings. This year we hung four stockings. I haven't decided how I want to do names on them yet, but there is one each for Jess and I, Jude, and Peter.

Ok, here's where it's going to get messy. Because pictures about Christmas traditions honoring a child lost shouldn't go right next to pictures of pregnant bellies,.... right?

But here's the pretty part of my mess!

Yup. You saw that correctly. I roughly quadrupled in size in less than a month. 

(That's what it feels like anyway!)

I LOVE my belly. Jess gets such a kick out of checking to see if my belly button has popped every night. It's going to be an outie soon for sure. The ladies at work were joking the other day about how it's going to be like the little red button on Thanksgiving turkeys. It will pop out when it's done cooking!

And last but not least here's the nursery wall that we painted a couple of weeks ago. We just got the decal up, and I think it will look super cute with the crib right underneath it!

Apparently Lola thinks we did it just for her,... ooh she's in for a rude awakening when the little guy makes his appearance!

And there you have it.

It's unorganized. It's messy. It's not tidily wrapped and presented in a pretty package. 

It's just reality. And it's BEAUTIFUL,.... but messy.

If you think about it,... it's appropriate for the Christmas season. 

Jesus entrance into the world was also messy.

But Oh! So, so beautiful. 

Ashes

I have a confession to make:

We still have Jude's ashes.

I always thought it was weird in movies when people had great granny so-and-so's ashes in an urn on the mantle piece. Put the poor old lady to rest already! Right?

But somehow, I've become the weird character in the show that can't seem to let go of that last little piece of their loved one. 

I mean they're ashes for Heavens sake! You're supposed to have the person cremated and then spread them somewhere special. Their favorite vacation spot, their garden, the beach,... 

But I think that's part of the problem. I burst into tears every time I even think about spreading Jude's ashes somewhere because:

He doesn't have anywhere special.

Jess and I were talking about Jude's birthday coming up, and what we're going to do to commemorate the day (besides gorging myself on chocolate birthday cake). I said we should get some helium balloons, attach notes and release them up on the Monument or somewhere else pretty. He suggested we take his ashes and spread them too.

In a way, the Monument would be a good place to leave them. It's an absolutely gorgeous place. You have the beautiful desert and red rock canyon with it's sheer drops overlooking the lights of the valley with the lush Mesa and rugged Bookcliffs for its backdrop. Jess and I have spent many hours hiking around up there and many date nights under those stars when we were too poor to do anything else. And it's a place we should be able to come back to regularly as we have family settled here and hope to make the valley our permanent home someday.

It IS a special place,... to Jess and I.

I need to come to terms with the fact that I really shouldn't keep his ashes in the shadow box on my night stand for the rest of my life. I just don't know if I'm ready though.... or if there will EVER be a time or a place that it will be any easier to open that tiny blue heart-shaped box and let its contents stream out into the wind. I know it's not him. But it's the closest thing I have.

Maybe it's ok to be the movie cliche for a little bit longer.... 

Praying for peace one way or the other.