Chez Perky

Not Cross Posting This One

I've got a new post at the new blog... but I'm not super-comfortable cross posting this one. So if you haven't emailed me for the new URL yet... now's the time, or check the Thursday, June 12 edition of the Lost and Found, if you know where to find that.

Remember, there's no special criteria, application, or prerequisites for getting my new blog URL. I just don't want to post a direct link here at this time. So all you have to do is email a quick one-liner asking for the URL and it's yours. Of course, you're welcome to also tell me more about yourself, as many have done... I love to hear about who you are or how you found me, or what your story is and why you're interested in li'l ol' me. But a one-liner will also do, if you're too shy to tell me more. I've gotten about 150 emails asking for the URL, and I've responded to all of them. If you haven't received a response from me, then it probably got bounced back to me. If you have an MSN account... for some reason, they're bouncing back to me, so try emailing me from a different account!

I Need a Cape

**First, some Housekeeping**
My Blog HAS MOVED! If you haven't gotten an email from me with the new URL, it's either because you didn't email me for the new URL, or because I tried to email you and your email bounced back to me. So email me (my email address is RIGHT THERE in my sidebar!) and ask for my new URL. You don't have to be an infertile myrtle, or a triplet mama, or a mama at all. You don't have to "qualify". Just shoot me a quick email for the URL. Failing that, keep an eye out at Mel's Lost and Found and wait for her to announce the new URL.

Don't be shy! I'm not moving to avoid YOU! I love you! Keep reading! I've been positively overwhelmed with the number of emails I've received over the last several days in response to my announcement that I'm picking up and moving. I've heard from over 100 people who I didn't even know were reading my blog. Some people just shot me a quick one-liner (e.g. "Hey, send me the new link, thanks!") and others told me their whole infertility history. I loved every single one of the emails. I tried to write back to everyone personally, though toward the end, I'm afraid I may have missed a few. But you all are astounding women and I am humbled to walk among you.

I will continue cross-posting here at blogspot until at least NCLM is done and so that any stragglers get the opportunity to move along with me. But after that, I'll be trying to figure out how to move my archives over to typepad and probably eventually shutting down this blog all together.

Please do not assume that I have your email and that I'll proactively email you. I had a huge computer crash back in January and replaced my dying little macintosh with a PC and have never figured out how to transfer over my email files and address book, so I'm without a lot of my old email addresses. I'm also busier than I've ever been, so proactive isn't my middle name anymore. I'm happy to respond to your emails asking me for the URL, but I can't promise that I'll think to email you first!

**End Housekeeping**

When people hear I have triplets, before they even hear I also have a four year old, they immediately say, "Wow, you must be SuperMama."  My response is always the same, "Nope, not SuperMama, just AdequateMama."  Some days are better than others.  I'm not perfect, but I do my best.  But there are days that I even impress myself. 

This morning, Seth had to go out to check the eruv, and left me at home with J and the babies.  J, happily, was entranced by the electronic babysitter, er, the idiot box, um, an educational video, a Disney DVD.    Suddenly, my three completely happy, peaceful babies started HOWLING.  It was still a little shy of breakfast time (about 15-20 minutes early, but in the ballpark), but it was clear that for whatever reason, they were all starving.  Normally if I'm home I do not feed Ellie and Sam bottles.  I nurse them exclusively while I'm home.  But with all three of them screaming, and the potential for J to start becoming needy at any moment as well, I realized that desperate times called for desperate measures.  So I went and prepared bottles for all three babies and returned, bottles and boppies in hand.

However, this still led me to a conundrum.  As Keira pointed out in an email to me recently, we MoM's (Mothers of Multiples) are not Octopuses, yet we have to be sometimes.  This was one of those times.  I don't bottle prop*.  I have never bottle propped.  Once, in my pediatrician's office, the nurse "helpfully" propped one of my babies' bottles and I was furious.  That was the one and only time that my babies have had propped botles.  So since I don't prop bottles and I'm not an octopus, how was I going to feed three screaming babies?  After all, the whole reason I wasn't nursing Sam and Ellie was because I had three screaming mouths to feed. 

But necessity, as you know, is the mother of all invention, and MoMs are resourceful and creative, if nothing else.  I put each baby in a boppy and put a bottle in each of their mouths.  At first I held one bottle with my left hand, stabilized the next bottle (the middle baby) with my forearm and held the third bottle with my right hand.  But Sam was not happy and was squirmy and screaming, while the girls were calming down, so it was clear that he needed some extra TLC.  I picked him up and held him in my arms and held the bottle in my left hand.  I moved Ellie over to my right side and held her bottle in with my right hand.  This left poor Abby.  None of my babies is coordinated enough to hold their own bottle in their mouth for an extended period of time (more than a few seconds), so that was no good.  Something had to be done.

And so, resourceful MoM that I am... I held Abby's bottle in with ...  my foot. 

I do wish I'd gotten a picture of this ridiculous sight, but of course if there had been anyone around to take a picture, then I would not have needed to have done anything so ridiculous!

So I may not be quite a DC or Marvel Comics-worthy superhero, but I do leap tall buildings in a single bound.  I think I need a cape.  And a sidekick. 

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*Please note I have no issue with people who do bottle prop, but it's one of the things that I felt very strongly about with my triplets.  I was told constantly before they were born that I would never be able to breastfeed (hah!), that I would never be able to feed them individually (Sunday's incident was one of only maybe three similar incidents in which all three babies were starving at the same exact instant that I can remember in the entire seven + months that we've had the triplets home... we have them fairly well trained to eat in rotation), that I would have to bottle prop, that I would have to do all of these things like it or not.  Since research shows that bottle fed babies are already held less than breastfed babies, it was very important to me that Abby (who cannot nurse) is held for her feedings with rare exception.  Bottle propping only discourages holding the babies during feedings.  I recognize that with multiples, particularly higher order multiples like mine and others, you simply do what you have to do to survive.  Therefore, I'm merely presenting what my parenting philosophy was, without judgment on what anyone else does, did, or did not do.  If bottle propping, podee bottles, or similar things is what kept another MoM sane, then by all means, I encourage it.  For me, it would have driven me further from sanity, so it was not a good option for me.

Official Notice

It's official, I'm setting up a new blog. Once I've got it all set up and pretty, I'll let you know the logistics of how to find it. I'm not going to leave a direct link here for how to find it, but I'll have Mel post the direct link in the Lost and Found. You can also email me directly for the link. If you're an anonymous lurker (one of my AWESOME ONES!) I hope you'll still email me for the link or find me over at Mel's. I love you guys and I don't want to lose you. I promise to lose your email address and forget who you are immediately... I've got so much else going on in my life, I wouldn't be able to remember anyway.

Anyway, I had two incidents happen recently (which had nothing to do with the anonymous commenting sh*tstorm of a couple days ago, though that didn't help matters) which just pushed things over the edge. I'd say what those incidents were, but it would just lead to hurt feelings and there's really no point in that, now is there.

In the meantime, here's some news:

Sam-man: He has a tooth. His opthalmology appointment went well - we'll keep an eye on it (no pun intended) and he'll go back in six months. He's seriously mobile, though he still can't sit up. It's not true crawling, but we're not far from that.

Ellie-bean: She is still toothless (thank HEAVENS...she bites me while nursing even WTHOUT teeth). She sits really nicely and is also seriously mobile - again, not true crawling, but that's not far away.

Abba-dabba: Still has two teeth. She is the least mobile, but not because she's not capable of it... just because she is more content to sit and play with a toy. She is starting to have some serious stranger anxiety, poor thing.

And that's it for now.

Trying out the TypePad

Trying out my new digs over here.  Things were getting a little too comfy over there in blogger-land.  I like that TypePad does IP logging, first of all.  But second of all, a couple IRL friends found me.  This isn't the end of the world, but it left my hands a little tied about talking about some of the things I would have preferred to talk about, seeing as how my blog was intended to be an infertility blog.  Yes, I'm now also a mommy blogger, and I won't ever be *just* an infertility blogger again, but I shouldn't have to censor out the infertility stories from my blog just because IRL friends are reading it, should I?  That's crazy. 

Plus, I've been itching for an excuse to move to TypePad for a while and haven't been able to justify paying for a blog service until now.  The recent sh*tstorm in my blogger blog from an anonymous commenter that crossed platforms into Jessica's blog just finally did it for me.  If blogger isn't going to log IP addresses for me, that's enough reason to change services, so here I am.  As soon as I get things worked out with how to get links set up and at least the *how* on getting my archives moved over, I'll start notifying people that my blog is moving over here. 

I still haven't figured out what to do about naming conventions.  Stick with real names?  Change them?  I don't know.  I'd put it to a vote, but since I have no readers here yet, that's kind of silly.

Name My Family! (updated at bottom)

There's a reason that I use real names on my blog, and I'm going to let you in on the secret. Are you ready? Are you really SURE you're ready? Are you sitting down?? Okay, here it is: I'm not witty. I am not good at coming up with aliases. I'm not creative or funny or interesting. I have a hard enough time coming up with real life things to say, let along making shit up.

I mean, come ON people, do you know how frickin' long it took us to come up with actual REAL names for our children? We had NO names for our children before they were born! The night before they were born we FINALLY came up with a list of about 20 girl names that we didn't hate, but no actual combinations of names, and it wasn't whittled down to, oh, you know the actual names we'd be using (in part because we didn't know if we'd be having 1, 2, or 3 girls). And hello? We had zero, count 'em, ZERO boy names picked out. Zilch. Zippo. Nada. Niente. Nuttin' Honey. We were blank slates praying that we didn't have three boys the next morning because we didn't have a single boy name, and I gotta tell you, when Baby A came out and Doc M said, "Baby Boy!" I was sweating BULLETS! Seriously! What if Baby Boy A was starting a trend! What if there were THREE of them!?

Whoops... getting off track here, and giving away the details of that elusive birth story I still haven't written for you. See, gotta keep you guessing so you don't stop reading. I swear I'm planning to write that someday...

Ahem. Back to the present.

The point is, I'm not witty. I'm not interesting. I'm not creative. I can't even come up with REAL frickin' names for my kids. I didn't even have a name for my son until he was a week old (and hell, he was called "Hey you" until he was nearly six weeks old... but that was because he didn't officially get his name until his bris, but AGAIN with me being off track!). So I never used aliases on this blog. I did for a while refer to Seth as "S" but I got lazy and started calling him Seth because, well, that's his name. I do pretty consistently refer to J as, um, J. I'm better about that because he's not legally mine... I'm his legal guardian, but not his custodial parent, so I try to be careful about that. But I get sloppy about initials, so I don't like sticking to initials. For the triplets, initials get hard because Seth has the same initial as Sam and well, again with I'm sloppy about initials.

Mel suggested that I go back through entries and remove names to make me more comfortable with the information I've got out there about me, and while it isn't the PERFECT solution, it's a start. But WHAT TO CALL MY FAMILY MEMBERS? I can't think of a favorite book that has FIVE FAVORITE CHARACTERS (one for Seth, and each of my four children). Same goes for a movie.

So, you, dear readers, are now charged with finding aliases for my kids and my husband. If I had twins, they could be frick and frack. But I don't. So go forth and be witty. Be creative! Be smarter than me!

Me personally? I think I'll stay Karen. Or maybe just Ms. Perky. But it's not like Karen isn't a pretty anonymous name. Do you know how many Karen's were in my elementary school? A frick-load, that's how many. And if you knew my middle name, you'd know there were a lot of Karen-plus-my-middle names floating around too. There were THREE of us in my graduating high school class. THREE. So I can live with my lack of anonymity with regards to my name. But as for the rest of my family? They need witty aliases. And you guys (girls?) are all WAY FUNNIER THAN ME.

So I know I've got lots of lurkers who rarely comment and this is your chance to shine. I don't block anonymous comments, so please feel free to be funny! Or even to be not funny. But post something!

EDIT: Just a reminder: There are FOUR children to think of, not just the triplets. Triplets, plus J, plus husband.

Moving in the Nebulous Future

There have been some things that I've wanted to write about recently... infertility related, and I haven't because I almost don't feel like this is the safe space it used to be. There are too many "real life" people who have popped into my blog unexpectedly (Julie and Diana, you don't count, you were invited here, so you're always welcome... for that matter, if you were invited, you're welcome here, so it's not you I'm talking about). But it's weird, you know? I started this blog to write about infertility. I feel guilty sometimes that I don't write about it so much anymore, and yet, here I am with a bunch of thoughts about infertility-related stuff and I'm not writing them because I don't feel like I can write about them here anymore. I feel like I've just made some mistakes with this blog. Too much of the real me. I mean, I'll always be the real me, but I mean, too many real names and pictures...it's just too... searchable. I don't mind that you all know our real names and all that. I just mind the searchability, I guess.

Anyway, I think I'm going to move my blog soon. I may change my mind and not bother, but that's what's on my mind right now. When I do it, I'll let you know how to find it, most likely, I'll just have you email me for the new URL and/or, I'll have Mel post a note in the Lost and Found Connections. But I just wanted to put you on notice. I'm not trying to be all dramalicious about it. It's just been on my mind. I've had this blog for a while and I don't like leaving it and throwing my archives away along with it. That frustrates me. I don't like losing the searchability for other people in terms of the topics people might be looking for help on. But ... I think it might be the right thing in the long run.

Still, I reserve the right to change my mind. I'm in a bit of a funky place this week, so it might just be me being in a bad mood. Who knows. But it's been on my mind for a bit now, so I think it might just be time. I don't want to move to a private, password-protected blog, so that's not the answer. I just think I'm going to move. For those of you who've done this before, have you been sorry you've done it? Have you lost readers? Have you found an easy way to do it? Should I not bother? Gah. I'm so indecisive.

My Feed and other Bloggity Maintenance

Thanks to Mel for alerting me today to the fact that my RSS feed was set to the "short" version... I never realized this. I find that quite annoying because I know that I certainly don't always have the time to click over to the full post on people's feeds if they don't show the full post their feeds, so gosh, I'm so sorry, and thanks to everyone who's remained a faithful reader despite my annoyingness. Why didn't anyone tell me?

And while I'm at it, having just noticed that Google Reader will tell me how many subscribers I have... what's with me having so many subscribers and having only dribs and drabs of comments? Is it the short version of the feed thing? Is it that I'm not interesting anymore? Is it that I just post photos of my kids these days instead of posting about the old infertility monster (not to worry, come the fall, I expect to be posting about the infertility madness again, so expect plenty of dramarama again, only this time it'll be even MORE fun, NOT)? Is it that you just don't love me anymore? TELL ME?

Finally, I did recently switch over to Google Reader and I put all my feeds into it based in large part on my blog roll on the left side of my blog and also based on the blogs that I haven't gotten around to updating on my blogroll, but that I see popping up in my comments occasionally. If you're reading my blog and you don't see your blog in the blogroll to the left, could you let me know? I don't promise to be speedy about adding you to the blog roll, but I do promise to be speedy about adding you to my Google Reader list (that's the easy part!). I don't promise tons of comments, but I do promise to check in occasionally!

Okay, enough maintenance from me. Hopefully I'll get a post up tonight about today's March of Dimes March for Babies. A good time was had by all!

My Place in the Blogosphere (Updated)

I've been contemplating the fate of this blog of mine... whether it really belongs here or not, in more ways than one. First, there's the simple question of whether I should stick with Blogger or move to Typepad or WordPress. I loathe WordPress, but I like that you can password protect individual entries, so it's tempting, though I'm entirely too lazy to make it happen anytime soon. Typepad is even more tempting, though I'm not sure I'm willing to fork over the cash to blog, since, well, this is, in essence, a useless pastime of mine. Mostly, I think I should switch to TypePad, but I've been saying that for two years, so my guess is that I'll be sticking with Blogger for the moment.

But the more pressing question is whether this blog even belongs here at all, in its present form. I don't know what my place in the blogosphere is anymore, and I know in some ways, I don't fit in and I never have... I never entirely fit the mold of a good and proper infertility blogger... I had primary infertility, but I had a foster son, so I wasn't a childless primary infertile, so I wasn't going through your typical primary infertility experience. On the other hand, I wasn't exactly going through secondary infertility either, was I? Still, I found my place in the infertility blogosphere, one way or another. And then I became one of "those people"... one of those bloggers who wrote about "pregnancy after infertility" and then "pregnancy loss after infertility" and then "pregnancy with higher order multiples after pregnancy loss after infertility". And now I'm a Mother of Multiples (MoM for short). And like many MoM's, I am parenting my multiples after experiencing infertility, so my life isn't JUST about the experience of parenting multiples. My perspective will forever be tainted with the infertility glasses. Some women move past infertility, but I don't think I ever will. Particularly since, crazy as it sounds, I want more kids and I know I can't "just" decide to have more.

But where do I fit? I hesitate sometimes to comment on infertility blogs these days, because do you really want a MoM commenting on your blog? (I don't know, I mean, really? Do you?) But I feel just as out of place on just plain parenting blogs (unless they're about parenting after infertility or about triplets or whatever...there has to be some common bond).

In some ways the name "My Perky Ovaries" isn't right anymore, except in other ways, it's more right than ever.

So what do I do? Do I stay here? Do I change my blog name? Do I make it more of a parenting blog? Do I stick with the whole infertility thing? (Considering that I plan to return to the fertility clinic for another round of fertility hell no later than the end of this year or beginning of next year, my guess is I'm sticking with the infertility thing) Do I start a whole new all-inclusive blog? Do I keep this blog for the infertility musings and start a separate parenting blog? Is that too much work? Do my infertile friends mind reading about my kids? Do I just realize that on some level we all hope and pray that someday ALL of us stirrup queens are writing about our kids so we can't ALL sit around being bitter about the kids that result from all these treatments? I don't know, maybe we can.

I think moving or abandoning this blog would be a bit on the tragic and somewhat melodramatic side. I get about 5,000 pageloads per week... about 3500 unique visitors per week... visitors from about all over the world. These are facts and figures that astound me, and surprise me whenever I see them on my statcounter summary. But they are there, every week, confirmed all the time. So... what to do.

Maybe I should just retire from this whole blogging business all together. I haven't been much of a good blogger anyway. But I'd be sad to leave my blog. Too sad, I think. So I don't think you'll luck out and be rid of me just yet. But for tonight, that's all you're getting out of me. I'm just too tired to be eloquent, even though I have far too much to say about the blessings in my life. It's been a long couple of weeks, and all the exhaustion of the last couple of months is finally catching up to me.

Your thoughts, as always, are appreciated.

Update:
Thanks for all your kind comments. I really wasn't trying to fish for compliments, but gosh, you all gave me lots of warm fuzzies. I don't think it's likely that I would actually stop blogging all together (Jess would KILL me!). I started my blog for me and only me, and if other people happen to read it, well, I find it amusing that anyone else would be interested in this dull life of mine, but I'm flattered. But I sometimes worry that I give a false impression of myself by passing this off as an infertility blog (what with the title and all), when I've got four kids (though, obviously, I fought hard for all of my children, including my foster son). But to discard the infertility label all together... well, that seems just as disingenuous. So anyway, here I will stay, and I'll post about... well, whatever. And you'll read it or you won't. And maybe I'll switch blogging services (most likely to Typepad), but I probably won't, because, you know, I've been threatening to move over to Typepad for, oh, two years now and I'm just too lazy and I don't want to have my archives scattered between two blogs and I'm too stupid to have a manual back up of my blog (which I really ought to do at some point, don't you think?). But the bottom line is, the Perky Household isn't likely to go anywhere, so you're stuck with me for the moment.

Perspective

I still owe the tale of how I came to have a c-section at 33 weeks, and how all that went and all, and I'm still a bit upset about how it all came to be, and the fact that it happened when it happened, but here's a bit of perspective about it...

The night before I delivered my three healthy babies, my doctor's other hospitalized triplet patient went into labor at 24 1/2 weeks. She had been hospitalized after an emergency cerclage earlier in the week and it didn't do enough. One of my worst nightmares throughout my pregnancy... a nightmare that almost came true for me several times. Worse, one of her triplets became septic and didn't survive. The other two, so far as I know, are still in the NICU, but doing well, considering.

Maybe 12-13 days after they were born, I was in the NICU fairly late at night and I ran into the other triplet mama in the elevator on my way home. I know it was her because my husband had described her to me, having seen her around the NICU, but also because she had those three NICU bracelets on her wrist. Those three bracelets just like me. The three bracelets that meant everyone in the hospital seemed to know who we were just with a glance at our wrists. "Oh you're the triplet mother!" "Oh, you must be Mrs. C!" "Hey, you don't know me, but I peeked in on your triplets this morning and they're adorable!" She had her three bracelets on, but more importantly, she had her eyes glued to the three bracelets on my wrist. She didn't say a single word to me, not one, but she never took her eyes off my wrist. I wanted to pull my sleeve down over the bracelets, but I knew that would just draw even more attention to the awkwardness of the situation. I couldn't say anything to her, because anything I said would have been wrong. I shouldn't know her situation. I shouldn't have known that she lost one, but NICU nurses talk, you know? I shouldn't have known anything about her, but I did. I couldn't tell her I was sorry for her loss, because we both knew that upstairs I had three healthy babies.

And so, we said nothing to each other, and I still regret that. All I could wonder was whether I would have taken off that third bracelet or not. I doubt that I would have had the courage to do so. I heard a week or so later that she had taken the third one off, and though I don't know what to make of that, I hope it means that some small piece of her had started down the next step of the grief process towards healing.

My doctor was absolutely devastated. He never loses triplets. It just doesn't happen in his practice. The earliest he's had triplets deliver before was 26 weeks and that was with a totally non-compliant 18 year old patient. You could see the pain of the loss in his eyes, his body language, hear it in his tone... I cried for her, but I also cried for him, because it was so obvious how attached to his patients he becomes. He told me three days after I delivered exactly how worried he'd been about me at different points in my pregnancy... points that I'd already forgotten about. I'd forgotten about that weekend when he thought he might be delivering me at 27 weeks. I'd blocked out of my head exactly how scary things got when my cervix went down to under 1.5cm and the contractions wouldn't stop. I hadn't REALIZED how worried he had become when my blood pressure started to creep up. I never knew that he'd wondered whether he'd be delivering me soon when I saw him at 30 weeks. I never knew how concerned he'd been as my terbutaline dose crept up and up and up. He had provided excellent medical care, impressed upon me the need to follow all doctor's orders. But he had NEVER allowed me to see his worry until after-the-fact. So I know that the sadness he felt over the loss of that triplet was real. I know he visited my triplets and her remaining two triplets in the NICU, which is apparently ridiculously uncommon in the NICU... OBs/Perinatologists apparently never make an appearance in the NICU.

When I found out I was pregnant with triplets, I wasn't thrilled; I was terrified, I was angry, I was sad, I was self-pitying, I was worried. It didn't take me long to figure out that I loved them fiercely, even as they were forming, and that nothing would convince me that I didn't want them. But I wasn't graceful. I blogged about it, knowing I would get a lot of crap for it, and I did get some pretty irate emails, but I'm not sorry that I wrote the truth. I tried to write the truth throughout my pregnancy experience. It wasn't always a very pleasant pregnancy, though the truth is, now I miss being pregnant so much I can taste it, oddly enough. One of the best by-products of my honesty was the number of people who contacted me when they found themselves pregnant with triplets. They either left comments or emailed me privately to either commiserate or ask advice or just to connect with someone else who was living through the same thing. I feel a very, very special connection to each one of you who looked to me for advice or support, though I felt (and feel) unworthy of giving any such advice when I received such amazing advice from incredible triplet veterans like Jody and Jessica among others.

A week or so ago, I heard from one of my friends who was pregnant with triplets. A woman I had never met, who is far across the country from me, but a woman whom I respect and admire more than she knows. The last I had heard from her, her water had broken around 17 or 18 weeks into her pregnancy, and she was on strict-flat-on-her-back bed rest in hopes of holding on to those babies until viability at least. A terrible, horrible position to be in, for sure. But then I delivered my triplets and I'd been out of the loop for a bit, until she emailed me to let me know that she delivered the first of her three triplets at 19 weeks, on the day I was admitted to the hospital. He lived for about an hour and she got to hold him and love him and say hello and good bye to him. She miraculously held on to his sister and brother for another two weeks before delivering them at 21 weeks. They, too, lived about an hour, before she lost them. I cannot begin to describe how devastated I was when I read her email and watched the beautiful memorial video she sent me. I would share it, but I haven't asked permission to do so, and it's not my story to tell, except as it pertains to this post.

I've never met my friend. She was, as Julie would say, a "friend inside the computer", but that makes her no less my friend, and makes me no less attached to her story. That is one of the beauties of the blogosphere. We are all spread across the world, we'd probably never meet under normal circumstances, and if we did, who knows if we'd ever realize we had enough in common to be friends. But here inside the computer, look how much we find in common with one another! Look how attached to each other's stories we become! This is a strange little universe we float around in, but I wouldn't change it for anything. I found love and support and humour and grace in the blogosphere when I thought I couldn't have any of those things in this ridiculous journey, and I continue to find all of that and tremendous friendship. I grieve for my friends' losses whether I've met them or not, and I take all of your stories very personally, even if I haven't had a lot of time recently to peek in and comment. I will resurface at some point, and I vow to leave at least three comments per week from here on out, because isolation is not any fun and I miss all of you and I would hate to think that any of you think I don't care anymore.

But mostly, to my friend who lost her triplets so tragically last month, know that my heart breaks for you and that it is not lost on me that no matter how much I would have liked SOME things to have gone differently, God gave me three precious gifts five weeks ago today. I will never lose sight of the fact that they could just as easily have been taken from me. I am so, so sorry for your loss and for the many losses I've seen in my time in the blogosphere. I rejoice with my friends when miracles happen, but my grief sinks just as low when tragedy strikes. I love all of you so much. Thank you for your support.

New Look!

So Jess decided one day that I needed a pick-me-up. I don't entirely remember why, but something was going on. So she conspired to get me a new header for my blog, which was good, because I'd been using a boring Blogger Template for the year that I'd had the blog, so it was about time for a new look. She conspired with Stefanie to create a new banner for me.

Apparently, Stefanie, who did this out of the goodness of her heart (or great love for Jess, I suppose), as I've never met her, but I'll be reading her blog from now on, sent bunches of images of cute pregnant chicks to Jess to possibly use, but they were all these impossibly tall, wicked thin, long-blonde-hair pregnant chicks shopping. Jess, knowing my great hatred for shopping and knowing that, well, I'm not tall (I'm 5'0"), not impossibly thin, and I'm guessing she figured out the blonde part (I have light brown hair), nixed them all. I found this very funny.

Anywhozit, I think it's just lovely, and I hope you like my new look, because Stefanie is clearly brilliant!