Tuesday

This morning, we buried our baby. It was a hard day. It was a healing day.

Amelia broke my heart over and over again, sweet girl. She is three years old, which means she asks hard questions, because she needs to see things concretely. She said things that everyone was thinking but couldn't bring themselves to say. She asked me why the baby came down from Heaven to be buried in a box. She cried and cried when she left the cemetery, because she wanted to see the baby. She said she wanted to die so she could live in that box with our baby. During the service, she turned to my friend who also lost her twins, and she said "Are you sad because your babies died? My baby died too." When we went to Hobby Lobby, she saw a baby and very loudly said "there's a baby! He didn't die!" She asked me if I thought the baby was sad, I told her I didn't think so, that Heaven was a wonderful, happy place. She said she thought the baby was sad, because he wants his mommy, because babies always want their mommies.

You know... I was able to give her a lot of answers, and provide a lot of reassuring words to the other things she said, but that last statement - it's hard to argue with that. Babies do want their mommies. And oh, it hurts so much to want my baby too.

Sophia, my little artistic one, she drew and drew all day long. She drew pictures of everything she saw and felt at the cemetery, she drew pictures of our family together with our baby (many times), she drew me crying, she drew angels, she drew heart-shaped clouds with light behind them.

We worked on our book. The day we told Sophia about losing the baby, she said we should make a book to remember the baby. She was totally right, that's what we needed to do. It's a work in progress, but it felt good to get it started. A lot of it will be finished once we name the baby, as of today the genetic results on the baby are not back yet, so we don't know if it was a boy or girl.

And then, because I had taken the day off work and I was so behind from feeling so bad physically this past week, I spent the rest of the day running around - to the post office, the grocery store, the copy shop, etc. And I had a church potluck thing tonight, which I hadn't thought much of attending, because I am usually gone Tuesday evenings to this group. Well, when it was time for me to leave, Sophia fell apart and cried. I felt so, so horrible about leaving. But I had committed to help out and had my dish and copies of some papers that everyone needed - I had to go. But I let the girls go to sleep in my bed, and they are snoring beside me as I type. I promised to hold them and kiss them and snuggle them all night long when I got home. And that's what I'm going to do now.