The Memorial Service & our due date

  In my previous post, I told about my experience with our miscarriage. Something I was uncertain about was what would happen to the baby after delivery. I didn't want the baby to just be thrown out like trash, but I also wasn't sure I wanted to necessarily have a funeral for him. Luckily, Palmer Funeral Home and SouthLawn offer a wonderful service for families like us. And they provide it for free! They bury the babies of all the families in an annual vault. Then they do a quarterly memorial service.

  It was a nice memorial service on a beautiful sunny day. They really do a wonderful with the service. They do a responsive reading/prayer and then list the names of the babies. They gave each family a carnation to put on the grave and a candle to keep for remembrance. I was hoping to not be the first person called, which we weren't, but they weren't at the memorial service... So we were the first to lay our carnations on the grave.



   This past week would have been our due date so I visited the cemetery again.  I put a little white flower on the grave.  I wanted to acknowledge this day in some way, but I wasn't exactly sure how.  I liked the innocence of the white, so that is what I went with.
(The other items are from other families; some I recognized from the memorial service.)
It was heartbreaking to see crosses with different first names, but the same last name by the 2012 and 2013 memorials.

  At this point, almost five months removed from the miscarriage, I'd say we do pretty good most of the time. Of course we have our sad and down moments, but having the three boys keeping us busy and making us keep moving forward, we ARE able to keep moving forward. I probably think of it most when I wonder if we will get pregnant again. (The boys are 2 years apart and then 17 months apart and T will be 2 next month...) Maybe we will get pregnant again and maybe we won't, but we're hoping we will. We'll definitely need lots of prayers if we do because I'm sure we'll be nervous the whole time!
   I've heard a lot of talk about why are we so secret about miscarriage, including losses that occur early in the pregnancy. Having been through a "public" miscarriage, we probably will share early if we do get pregnant again -- mainly for the prayer support. :) Nobody wants to share about miscarriage, but it unfortunately does happen quite often and having others support you through it is definitely helpful.

The two circles at the top right were his "boy baby" and "girl baby"

   I will say this about getting pregnant again, A has baby fever and talks about us having another baby. Just the other day he asked when we were going to have another baby; before that, he asked if he'd get a sister next time, I told him that was up to God. When I was pregnant, he drew a picture of two babies and said I was having a boy and a girl - so maybe he was being prophetic for a future pregnancy -- I have always wanted twins :-P