The Calm In The Storm.

Wednesday night at 6:14 a C-17 doing a practice flight for the air show this weekend went down; the 4-man crew died.  There was no way for them to get out...C-17s are cargo planes...cavernous, windowless planes so huge it seems impossible they are even able to fly. 

The pilot was practising a "touch and go" maneuver, and on the take off, banked too hard and ended up flipping the plane. 

Brandon is on the Search and Recovery team. 

He's out there looking for the remains of these four airmen as I type this. 

I can't even begin to imagine what he's going through...what he will go through these next few days.  I'm sure he'll see things that'll haunt his dreams for who knows how long.  I'm so proud of him for being so willing to do what is asked of him...not once has he complained about being chosen for this duty.  Not even after working from 0500-1900 yesterday with a two hour break in the middle. 

It'll be another long day for him today...he was driving the first body to the hospital when I last heard from him. 

I'm trying to make our home the calm in his stormy days...keeping things picked up, entertaining the kids so he can relax when he is here...but I just feel so very helpless.  I feel like I should be doing more.  I want to be out there with him, holding his hand, helping him get through this, and it hurts that I can't. 

I'm so proud of my husband, proud of his sacrifice, his courage, his strength, his willingness to do what he can for the families of the airmen who lost their lives so unexpectedly.

Forty Pounds.

I started dieting and exercising last week...figured I'd better come on here and blab about it to whoever reads this silly little thing :)

My friend Manda told me about this site/iphone app called My Fitness Pal...I love it.  It's a calorie tracker, and it's so easy to use I can't possibly come up with an excuse to NOT use it.  It automatically syncs whatever I put into my phone with the website...which is great. 

So I've been using that...sticking to a 1500 calorie a day diet and trying to do something active every day, even if it's just shopping.  So far so good!  I'm going to spin classes at the gym a couple times a week and have been walking either around the neighborhood or on our treadmill.  My first weigh-in is this friday so we'll see if I'm making any progress. 

Losing 40 lbs will get me within 5 lbs of what I weighed when I got pregnant with Piper.  Kinda funny how I lost the baby weight with Beckett before I lost Piper's.  :) 

I Only Miss One Thing About Being Pregnant...

And that one thing is the lack of a bleeding vagina.

Periods are the worst.

Just sayin. 

A Hard Time.

I've been having a really hard time this past few days. 

I don't even know what exactly is wrong, which is making it extremely difficult to remedy the situation.

At first I thought it was stress and anxiety over our family coming to visit next week...but lately I think I just miss my friend.

I miss having someone to talk to that understands me...that cares about the same things I do...that listens to what I have to say and offers appropriate advice and/or comments.

Of course I have my husband, whom I love dearly, but there's only so much he can do.  He's at work all day while I'm at home with a moody 4 year old, a teething 8 month old, and a messy house that absolutely HAS to be cleaned by next Tuesday.  Not to mention the things I'd rather be doing...like crocheting new products for my etsy store, or playing a video game without having to answer a million questions, or work out without having to make sure the kids are entertained, or take a shower, or eat a meal without having to share tiny little bites with the puppy dog baby bouncing up and down at my knees.

Because I can't do any of those things, I end up not wanting to do anything.  I end up wanting to crawl into bed and cry. 

I know it's affecting my relationship with the rest of the family, especially with my husband.  But what can I do?  I tried to get the few friends I do have together for a picnic today, but most can't make it.  I tried to spend the afternoon outside yesterday, but Beckett wouldn't have it.  I just don't know what to do anymore.

I don't know how to fix myself.

Long Time No See.

It's been a while, my friend...I fell out of my weekly routine while recovering from my little hospital adventure a few weeks ago.  I still can't believe all that happened less than a month ago...it feels like it's been months.  Not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing. 

I haven't really been up to much.  I opened an Etsy shop, sophieplayshooky.etsy.com .  I'm still in the process of filling it up, then I'll focus more on promoting and trying to get more traffic.  I did, however, purchase this:

and have been making lots of yummy goodies, including:

pancakes......and:

Bacon!!!  Is that not the cutest thing ever??

I'm working on a "Welcome Baby" gift for my dear Manda who is moments away from greeting her little Dominic as I type this.  It feels weird not being able to go visit her or help her...she moved to Vegas a couple months ago.  I miss her terribly; it's lonely without my Target buddy living around the corner from me.  But, that's the military, and I know we'll be friends for years to come.

Anyway, I'm off to snuggle with the hubs (who tested for Staff today, by the way...we find out if he made it in August) while we finish season 2 of Bones. 

Happy thoughts to all.

Keeping My Hands Busy.

In light of recent events, I've been pretty much moving from my bed to the couch and back to my bed for the past few days.  The incisions burn and sting whenever I get up or sit down, so I've been moving as little as possible, and am more thankful now for our brand new comfy cozy bed than I was the first night I slept on it.  I've never felt pain in my belly button before...and it is definitely something I could have lived without.

Physically I'm feeling better each day, which is great, since I was sick of lying around all day by Tuesday afternoon.  I'm actually considering sneaking out for a pedicure tomorrow...I could use some pampering.  I'm mostly just tired, and sore, and my hormones are going crazy so I'm definitely riding the mood swing roller coaster. 

I've needed something to keep my hands busy though, and the baby blanket I was working on (to sell on Etsy) just wasn't cutting it, so I dug out some yarn and set to work. 

I bought these twelve skeins of blues, greens, browns, and a red and a purple on sale while Brandon was deployed.  I meant to make us an afghan for our bedroom.  Then Brandon came home and surprised me with a new bedroom set and I forgot all about the yarn and bought a comforter set which I've fallen in love with.  So now I think this super soft cuddly yarn will make a lovely living-room afghan, and possibly a couple cushions if I'm lucky. 

 I've got 18 squares down already...the first 12 took a while since I had to figure out the colors.  Each color is used once in each position (center, middle, and outer) and no two of the original 12 use the same 3 colors (if that makes sense...).  It's going fairly quickly now that I have to just make these 12 squares over and over. 

Having something else to concentrate on...something immediate and concrete to focus my attention on has helped me cope immensely.  The despair I felt when I realized I was losing a child I never wanted in the first place has lessened.  I've started to realize this pregnancy was never going to live, whether it was planned or not, and nothing I could have done would have changed that.  I shouldn't feel guilty for not wanting the baby...for that short burst of relief I felt when it was clear it was an ectopic pregnancy and not just a very early pregnancy in my uterus.  What I went through is not the same as an abortion.  I don't know if the baby's heart was beating or not, but either way, it wouldn't have been for much longer...and if it had, it could have stopped mine.  I don't feel completely at peace with what happened, but I am getting there, and that in itself gives me peace. 

 It is, however, just now dawning on me that I am missing a fallopian tube.  I know, it seems silly, but I have been focusing so much on losing a baby that I completely forgot about losing a body part. 

I just want to say thank you for all of your support and your kind words.  I've read everything you all have written to me many times...I haven't been able to respond individually to all of you because honestly I just haven't been strong enough to find the right words to say, but I want you to know I do appreciate your notes very much. 

Yesterday.

Saturday afternoon I started getting these cramping pains in my abdomen...they went away for a few hours, but came back that night and ended up waking me up a few times.  Woke up Sunday...same thing.  I thought I was constipated, so I went out and got an enema...absolutely nothing came out so I knew that wasn't it.  I tried to just relax and went to bed...but after being woken up for the third time at 4AM I knew I needed to go in to the emergency room. 

They had me give a urine sample to kinda figure out what was going on.  The doc came in and told me the urine came back fine, but it tested positive for a pregnancy test.  Not good, since I have an IUD.  A pregnancy where an IUD is present typically ends up being an ectopic pregnancy, which basically means it's a pregnancy where the baby is outside of the uterus, typically in a fallopian tube.  It can be very dangerous for the mother...if the baby grows large enough it could rupture the fallopian tube kill the mother. 

I was sent for an ultrasound (topical and pelvic...super uncomfortable)...but all they could see was a growth that looked like a benign tumor near my right fallopian tube.  Couldn't find the baby. 

My ER doctor hands my case over to an OBGYN doctor who tells me she wants to send me in for a laproscopic surgery so she can both take a look at the growth and look around for the baby.  She said if she found the baby she'd remove it, or if the growth looked dangerous, she'd remove it, but that the whole surgery should last an hour at the most. 

Two hours later, I woke up. 

My doctor came over and told me the growth was actually the pregnancy, and that it had started to rupture (hence all the pain I was in).  She had a bunch of pictures to show me, which was pretty cool.....she showed me what my left fallopian tube looked like, (flat, squishy, empty) then what the right one looked like (stretched super tight with what was obviously an embryo in it).  She ended up having to remove my entire right fallopian tube. 

The whole day was probably the scariest day of my life.  It's still so surreal...I just can't wrap my head around it.  I was pregnant.  I could have died.  I lost my baby. 

We are by no means in any way ready to have another child...Beckett isn't even seven months old yet.  But still...the fact that I was pregnant and lost a baby....it just hurts so bad.  I don't know how to get over this.  I don't know how I'm supposed to feel, what I'm supposed to do, how to move past this.  I can't stop kissing and hugging Piper and Beckett, yet every time I do I can't help but think about this baby and what could have been.

I'm probably going to be MIA for a few weeks while I try to deal with all this and recover from the surgery.