One Month...

It has now been a month (and 13 hours) since I silently delivered Eli. A month does not sound like a very long time but it's been a pretty incredible journey. I have gone from feeling like there would be no way possible for me to leave the hospital without my child to feeling both beat up and beat down, to being at total peace with the events that took place. I have cried, I have laughed, I have walked in the shadows of other mothers going through similar experiences. I have only left the house three times but hey, I'm reducing my 'carbon footprint' and not straying from our family budget! I have total peace but I'm still not quite 100%, obviously. I still have physical reminders of what I've gone through and I expect that the tides will shift again before too long but I still believe that there was a purpose for this all happening.

I have come to terms with my new normal. We still do normal "normal" things around here... coloring Easter eggs, cooking, playing, cleaning, time-outs, baths, movies, and getting outside when the weather cooperates. But, there's also a new normal. The normal that every day I will be asked the question "when are we going to have a new baby?", "why did baby Eli die", the new normal where I still know that I would have been in the middle of my 21st week of pregnancy, we would know if the baby was a boy or girl, we would have a list of names, the nursery would be started again, I would be completely in maternity clothes or sweats, my sciatic nerve would be screaming at me, I would weigh about 15 pounds more than I do now... those thoughts are still with me. I'm ok with it though. Those thoughts are all conceived by me, not by what God's plan is for me.

I'm having kind of a quiet day today. I miss Eli, terribly, but at the same time I can't take myself down the road where I'm a mess about today. I know he's safe, I know he's happy - that makes it hard for me to be totally worked up about this angel-versary. There will always be a part of my heart that's missing but there's also a part of it that I would never had known had Eli never come in to my life.