Due Date Approaches after Miscarriage

 

As our due date looms closer, I find myself missing my Baby Boy a lot again.  Overall I’m doing really well emotionally.  I’ve moved on from the grief that crippled me those first few months.  There are still a few things that can trigger some painful memories, but overall, I’ve healed as much as one can heal from this.  I’ll always have a scar though.

But as our due date is less than a month away, the lost future is starting to rear its head in my life again.  As I am excitedly awaiting the birth of my niece, it reminds me that we should be welcoming our new addition just a few short weeks later.  We had our future torn from us and it’s heartbreaking to remember that.

I can’t help but wonder what our little boy would have been like.  Would he have loved to read? Play sports? What would he have wanted to be when he grew up? Would he have gotten good grades? Would he behave or push the limits?  Who would he have been friends with? I have so many questions about my little boy that I won’t get answered until I get to see him when I get to Heaven.  I know that God is watching my baby, but I just wish I would have gotten to meet him.

While watching the Olympics, there was a story on Sarah Burke, a snowboarder who hit her head while in an unsanctioned competition a few years ago and died.  It really struck a chord with me when her mother said in the interview, “I used to tell everyone that the worst thing would be to lose Sarah.  But now I know that the worst thing would be to have never had her in my life at all”.  Maybe not those EXACT words, but pretty close.  And it’s so true.  Not getting to meet your baby is so hard.  You’ve missed out on so much.  Losing a child, no matter when, is heartbreaking.  And our baby still touched a lot of lives even though no one ever got to meet him.  But being robbed of ever getting to know him is something that is hard to accept.  So many what-ifs.  I had so many dreams.  And only one of them came true: getting to see him on our first ultrasound.  That’s the only time I got to see my baby.

So I’m going to do my best to honor my baby and be happy for the time we did have with him.  I’m going to light a candle for him on March 21, so that he knows that we’re thinking about him and miss him so very much.  And I know that when we do have a family of kids, he’ll be an amazing big brother watching out for his siblings on Earth.

I miss you Baby Boy Ray.  And I remind everyone out there to cherish every moment you have with your children and loved ones.  You never know when the last time you’re going to see them is.  Tomorrow is never promised.

Book Review: Cress

Cress
by  Marissa Meyer
Date Read:  2/25/14
Rating: ★ ★  ★  ★  ★

I absolutely love this series.  It is such a unique concept.  A sci-fi, dystopian, fairy-tale retelling story.  I have loved every character that Meyer has introduced us to.  I love it!  This book is a Rapunzel retelling.  I was so excited for this book, as Tangled is one of my favorite movies of all time.

The only criticism I can give this book right now is that the Rapunzel storyline wasn’t as wrapped in to the plot as the other stories have been.  Cinderella was very obvious – with the “stepdaughter” being treated like a slave, having a secret friend (not mice though), going to the ball, losing a shoe (or foot).  Even Scarlet had a lot of Red Riding Hood undertones that you could see.  Sometimes it was a little too obvious in that story – wolves kidnapping her Grandma.  But Rapunzel, I felt, wasn’t as strongly represented in this book.  I feel like it all happened at the beginning, but the whole book should have focused on it.  Though it did focus on her relationship with Thorne, the actual Rapunzel part was over by the end of the first part of the book and I forgot that’s what the story was titled after half way through.  There were quotes from the Rapunzel story at each part, but it tended to be more related to other characters in the book than actually Cress.

I enjoyed watching the relationship of Cress with Thorne develop.  I’ve always enjoyed him because he’s funny and sarcastic, but deep down he really cares about Cinder.  But in this story, we get to see a softer side of him.  Thorne also had quite a plot twist thrown at him and it was so interesting to see such a change. [Spoiler: When Thorne loses his eyesight, I expected him to fall apart and completely lose his cool.  But he accepted it so easily and ended up getting around really well.  I almost feel as if this change in his character is partly why he was able to finally start caring about Cress.  He had to depend on her and let his guard down.  This was a very interesting character trait that I think is great in his development.]

Dr. Erland has always been someone I’ve been a little unsure of.  He seemed like a good guy, but he wasn’t quite involved enough to know.  [Spoiler: At the beginning of this book, there is reference to his lost “Crescent Moon” and the reader knows instantly that Cress is his daughter.  But I felt like this should have been mentioned in one of the other books, so it wasn’t so obvious. I would have rather it had more of a shock value like when the characters found out.  Or at least when he did the paternity test to be sure.  And for some reason I never saw him catching the Plague coming. I definitely should have.  I should have known one of the characters would die from it (even though Peony was already a casualty to it).  And with the whole virus mutating thing so it now was affecting Lunars, I definitely should have seen it coming.  But I didn’t.  She ended up masking that pretty well.  I felt so bad for him.  But at the same time, he was an old man, so better Meyer killed him off than one of the younger, more main characters.]

There was a point in time when all the characters split up about a quarter of the way in to the book.  It was a little hard to keep up because they were in 3 different places dealing with different things.  When most of them finally got back together, the story really started to move.

Almost every character in this book had a POV at some point in the story, even Queen Levana.  Most of the time it was pretty easy to tell them apart because they were broken up by chapter.  But toward the end of the book, each character had their part to play so it would switch mid-chapter.  That was a little jarring the first time it happened, but then it started to make sense.

I really liked watching their plan come together.  It was written pretty well, like I was watching it all unfold in a movie.  I was beginning to think it was going to go as planned.  But obviously it couldn’t.  Once it got to this point, I couldn’t put the book down.

I think all of the characters have a love story now.  It’s kind of cool that they all have a person, but I think they only truly single person in their group now is Iko, the android.   The romantic in me enjoys this.  The realist in me thinks it’s a little ridiculous that all the people they happened to group up with have some sort of romantic relationship.

The best part of the book was the first glimpse at Princess Winter.  I wasn’t sure what to think of her, but knowing the final book in the series is called Winter, and based on Snow White, I’m assuming she will end up being a good guy and join Cinder and her friends in taking over Levana.  But then who will take the throne? Cinder (Princess Selene) or Winter?  I’m thinking Winter will take the throne and Cinder will come back to Earth and date Emperor Kai.  But then Adri and Pearl will have to get their comeuppance also.

I really enjoyed the end of the book.  The scene between Cinder and Kai was amazing.  It felt so real.  I felt like I was there next to them in the room.  And then Levana’s revenge was not quite a shock, but her violence is so over the top, that you can’t imagine they she just did that.  The sacrifices of people who’d helped them makes you hate Levana even more.  And Cinder resolves to “start a revolution”.

I’m so stoked for the final installment in this book.  I hope Meyer doesn’t let me down like Allegiant and Mockingjay.  I’m looking forward to an epic battle and I can’t wait to see how she overthrows Levana.  I hope the next year goes by quickly so I can finish this amazing series.

Movie Review: That Awkward Moment

I'm not sure where to start this review.  I think I'll start with how much I adore Zac Efron.  I've loved him since he was in the TV show Summerland as a side character.  Then he made it big on Disney in High School Musical (yes, I still watch the Disney channel even now).  The next real movie I saw him in was Charlie St. Cloud.  That was a great movie.  It actually inspired me to read the book, which I really enjoyed. But I thought his acting was really good in that.  I feel like his acting is pretty natural.  He was able to pull off a real sense of friendship with the other actors. The acting I love best is when they can really just bounce off each other really quick and easily (think Gilmore Girls).  And of course, Zac Efron has gotten buff also, so he's pretty easy on the eyes as well.

But lets stop oogling Zac Efron and talk about the movie.  I think the plot and concept were really great.  It was nice to see a movie from the guy's perspective. You don't see that very often.  I also really liked that they had the guy who was going through a divorce along with the guys who were trying to start relationships with girls.  The dynamic was very interesting.

Some of the dialogue was really well scripted.  And some of the scenes were so subtle but amazing - I attribute this mostly to the actors though.  You can plan to add some subtle things to it, but the actors have to be able to pull it off to make it work - and they did.

The movie had quite a few really funny scenes.  This is definitely considered a romantic comedy.  It is probably one of the funnier romantic comedies I've seen in a while.

But lets talk about the raunchiness of the movie.  This movie is rated R.  I actually wanted to find out why it was rated R before going in, because we expected it to be rated PG13.  What I found when I did research is that it was mostly rated R for language.  They use the "F" word a LOT.  Profusely.  Unnecessarily.  But I can overlook that.  My reserach said that it also wasn't that raunchy.  So I was happy.  Because honestly, raunchy movies are not my favorite.  Sometimes it can be funny, but most of the time it's completely unncesssary - it doens't move the plot along.  It's just there.  But when we watched the movie, there were actually quite a few scenes that I was surprised were in there.  Scenes that I think when they get edited out for TV, won't affect the quality or plot of the movie.

So instead of getting an A rating from me, I think I give it a B for the raunchy scenes.  It seems like a cop out to add a few more minutes to the movie and make the poeple who like that kind of stuff happy.  But honestly, this movie would have actually been very good without those scenes and the profuse use of the "F" word.

My favorite part of the movie was at the very end when he has his soliloguey trying to win the girl back.  I thought it was a great way to wrap it all up and bring it back to the beginning.

Soo....what did you think?

Next Phase: Read Through!

Brandon has officially completed his first edit of his book!  It was a tedious process of which he did not enjoy every minute, but was necessary.  Now that it's finished, he is ready to print out some copies and get feedback.

He printed several copies and we are going to pass them out to friends and family who we think would be interested in this genre and who believe will give us good feedback.  The worst thing would be for someone to feel uncomfortable telling him their true thoughts, and then he is heartbroken when no publishers will read the book.  Don't feel left out if you don't get a copy either - he only printed about 6 copies - it's expensive to print so many pages just for a read through!

So basically we're asking for feedback on content, flow, plot, and grammer.  Everyone knows how much a book will be torn apart if it has grammer issues, so that is a huge one.  I'm not sure what timeline we're looking at for getting feedback from everyone. I'm thinking a couple months?  Does anyone have any suggestions for a timeframe? I know our goal is to get the feedback early enough that he can get everyone's edits completed and we can send it out to publishers before the end of the year. So I'm thinking a couple months, maybe 3 or 4?  Then it will take him a while to go through the feedback and edits from 7 different people.

We also will need to start researching how to make submissions to publishers.  What are they looking for? What do you need to send with your manuscript?  How do you print off the manuscript?  We also have an indirect contact at Scholastic (see previous post here), so hopefully we can get someone to at least read it there.  I hear that is the hardest thing - getting someone to actually pick it up off the desk and read it.

Anyways, the next phase is happening and we can't wait!  We are looking forward to everyone's feedback and planning the next phase!

Ebates - Pays YOU for shopping online!

I have a Capital One credit card that I used to use to buy anything and everything.  We get bonus points per dollar on all our purchases.  And on top of that, they had this thing called Perk Central where if you bought online through the links, you could earn even more bonus points depending on the store.  For instance, I got an extra bonus point per dollar when shopping at Bestbuy.com or 5 bonus points per dollar when I bought tickets at an AMC theatre.

 

However, a few months ago they took away Perk Central in favor of the new “Capital One Deals” program.  There has been a grand total of TWO deals over the past 1.5 years they’ve been doing this that I have actually used.  The problems that I have with this Deals program over Perk Central is that 1) They are usually stores that I never shop at, and 2) Even if it is a store I shop at, I have to go and spend that much money THAT week.  The deals are only good for one week.  So basically this program is telling me when I can spend money.  So we do not end up using this program and it has made me less loyal to Capital One.  And what frustrated me most about it was that they never notified us that they were removing the Perk Central.  I had to call them after several times of trying to find the new location when the website was updated.
 

So since then I’ve been trying to find more ways to save money because we are frugal and hey, why not try to save some money while spending it, right?  I saw a commercial for ebates.com over the weekend, and vaguely remembered when one of my husband’s colleagues told him about it years ago.  At the time, we had Perk Central, so it made sense to stick with that.  But  since we now don’t have Perk Central, I decided to check it out this weekend.

After looking it over this weekend, I definitely signed up!  At most places, all you have to do is just shop online after starting on their website.  It will open a ticket for you, and as long as you place an order, you’ll get the designated cash back from each store.  And the best part?  Amazon is one of the retailers!!  This is even better than Perk Central!  I made my first purchase yesterday.  I’m not sure how long it usually takes for the credit to show up in my account, but then they are supposed to pay you out quarterly.  Pretty awesome.  And here’s another cool part:  If you refer friends, you get even more money!  So friends, if you haven’t already, please go sign up and finish your Christmas shopping by using ebates!

A Miscarriage Thanksgiving Update

I love holidays where we get together with family.  They’re such good support even when you don’t really know you need support.  Thanksgiving was not a day where I was expecting to need support, but it turned out I needed it a lot more than I thought I would.

I had woken up the day before Thanksgiving thinking to myself how strong I had been lately.  I hadn’t cried over our baby in quite a while.  That doesn’t mean that I didn’t think about him, but that I had almost healed from the experience and was looking toward the future.  But everything came crashing down on me on Thanksgiving.

Maybe it’s because I was looking forward to the future of trying again.  Maybe it was seeing everyone being thankful for their kids.  Maybe it was seeing my pregnant sister-in-law.  Maybe it was just spending Thanksgiving without our baby.  But I ended up having a bit of a melt-down.  I felt the tears coming, so in order to not embarrass myself in front of our entire family, my husband and I took a walk.  I had to let it all out.  We took about 10 minutes for me to gather myself and put everything back in a box.  But I think that’s all I did.  Just put it in a box so I could get through the day with our family.

I had several aunts come up to me later that day.  We haven’t seen the family since the miscarriage, so we haven’t really talked to anyone.  It was really nice to hear that they were thinking about us and praying for us.  And they said some really nice things about our future and how hard this is.  It really meant a lot.  It had been so long since it happened that not many people talk to us about it anymore.  And I know life has to move on, but it’s going to take me a lot longer to move on than the rest of the world.  So it was really helpful to have such loving people wrap their arms around me as I teared up again.  I didn’t feel as silly holding back tears anymore.  But I had already put most of my feelings back in that little box a few hours earlier.

It didn’t really hit me again until Saturday and Sunday.  I had things to keep me busy throughout the weekend like shopping and putting up all my Christmas decorations.  I did some pinteresting on Saturday and found some really sweet quotes.  One that most comes to mind is about pennies from Heaven.  It states

“I found a penny today / just laying on the ground / But it’s not just a penny / this little coin I’ve found / “Found” pennies come from Heaven / that’s what my Grandpa told me / He said angels toss them down / oh how I loved that story / He said when an angel misses you / they toss a penny down / Sometimes just to cheer you up / Make a smile out of your frown / So don’t pass by that penny / when you’re feeling blue / It may be a penny from Heaven / that an angel tossed to you”

Remember this one for later. 

Sunday is where it really hit me though.  I woke up in kind of a funk, and was in a bad mood almost all day.  I was either angry or depressed.   While I was in Walmart, I was thinking about our baby who should have been there for Thanksgiving with me.  We should have been talking about the next 3 months and what it holds.  But we don’t get to. And so many women terminate their pregnancies willingly or hurt the babies they are blessed with.  But as I was walking out of Walmart in my funk, I saw a penny on the ground.  And I instantly remembered the poem I saw on pinterest, and it made me think that our baby sent that penny to me to make me smile and know that he is okay.

I obviously picked up the penny and squeezed it tight and thanked Baby Ray for sending that penny to me.  It pulled me out of my funk.  But then I was just sad the rest of the day.  Missing our baby.  Wishing we had gotten more time with him.  And at the same time, I realized that I think some of it is from fear.  Of us thinking about trying again.  As exciting as it is to think about being pregnant again, I’m really scared of the same heartache all over again.  I don’t want the next baby to feel any less loved because of my fear, but I’m scared.  I’m scared of walking in to that doctor’s office again. I’m scared that we’ll lose the next baby too.  I’m scared that when we do get pregnant again, that everyone, including me, will stop thinking about Baby Ray #1.

So physically I’m doing great.  My period came back 4.5 weeks after the surgery.  Everything seems fine.  My body finally went all back to normal.  But emotionally I had a relapse this weekend.  Actually, now that I’ve typed it out, I don’t think it’s as much a relapse as just new fears.  I had overcome the other fears and guilt.  But now that we are in another chapter of our lives, new fears seem to have come to light.  About forgetting our baby again (but for a different reason) and the fear of this happening again.  With a little bit of loss remembrance sadness thrown in for good measure just to bring on the tears.

I’ve been told by those who have had miscarriages that you’ll have good days and bad.  That sometimes you’ll find yourself crying for no reason. The littlest thing can bring on a bad day.  I think a lot of things surrounding Thanksgiving brought on my bad day, but it ended up being a bad weekend.  But writing this blog has actually helped me figure out some of my feelings.  This blog has been very therapeutic to me – it was my way of initially dealing with my grief as well.  I’m not sure how many people actually read this blog, but to those who do, I’m grateful.  And I hope my story touches just one other person who is feeling the same way.

I believe that our baby watches out for us though.  I believe he wants happiness for us and that he is in good hands in Heaven.  I believe that we will meet him when we get to Heaven ourselves. In the meantime, he will send us pennies when we’re sad, to remind us that he’s okay and that we’ll be okay.  And that gives me hope.  Now I just need to focus on that hope to overcome my new fears.

Book Review: Allegiant

Allegiant
by  Veronica Roth
Date Read: 11/23/2013
Rating: ★ ★

Okay.  It’s been about a week since I finished off this book and I think I can coherently write a review for this.  I think this leans toward 2.5 stars.  I will start off by saying I am disappointed by yet another YA series conclusion this year.  Both series were my two favorite series ever, and both ended in tragic disappointment and anger (the other being Clockwork Princess).

 

First I will start off with the two POVs (Tris and Four’s).  While I liked the change, I think it should have been done that way from the beginning [spoiler: especially with Tri dying in the end.  If you didn’t want everyone to expect that was what was going to happen (after all, how do you conclude a story when the character dies), it should have been done since book 1 ].  But also, the two voices were so similar.  It was hard for me to determine who was talking.  The only identification you had was on each new chapter page.  If you forgot mid-chapter, you were out of luck.  Their voices needed to be much more different.  I felt like I lost a lot of the book because I constantly had to remember who was talking.  This was a total fail on the author’s part of making sure her characters were different.  And their personalities had been very different, but I think as soon as she started writing both, she ended up blending them.

The change in setting was frustrating for me too.  This book was supposed to be a dystopian society, but as soon as they leave at the beginning of this book, everything we know is thrown away.  Not to say they are not still in a dystopian society, but it is not what we think.  This was something that was very hard for me to get over.  Now, I can accept the whole scientific background to this whole thing seeing as I majored in Biochemistry and genetics is very interesting to me, but it completely changed the type of story this was to me.  It took me a good 300 – 400 pages to get comfortable with the change. I felt like there should have been more foreshadowing about this twist. I  felt like the beginning of the series did not lead us to the end of the series. 

Now, I was super excited that we finally got a clear definition of what “Divergent” is.  With the movie coming out, I was trying to figure out how to define “Divergent” to my husband, knowing that he would ask at some point.  And before reading this book, I couldn’t figure out a good definition.  So it made me start questioning how well the first books were written if I couldn’t even define the title of the first book!  So it’s nice to finally know what it truly means. And I think it was a good way to do it. I just feel like the lead up to the realization could have been done much better, and much smoother.

There were some fights between Tris and Four in this book that didn’t seem real.  It just seemed like something thrown in to create tension – not done nearly as well as the first two books.  Tris was never this jealous, know-it-all like she is in this book. I actually got to the point where I didn’t really care about her [spoiler: And that is probably why her death didn’t affect me as much as it was supposed to ].  She suffered from what my husband and I call, “Bella Syndrome”.  We grew to not enjoy the main character because of who they become over the length of the series.  Tris’s behavior was very out of character for her and it frustrated me.  And her constant know-it-all attitude really made me angry.

I did like some of the other character relationships that were built in this book though.  And there was a twist with a character coming back from the dead.  We also got some background information on Tris’s mom, which was actually very interesting.  That was probably the most interesting thing to me in this book – which when you think about it, is pretty sad.

The big fight at the very end was pretty much non-existent.  I actually didn’t like how it was ended. I felt like she got herself in a spot where she couldn’t get her characters out of it any other way. [Spoiler: I hate that what they did to the institute was exactly what the institute was going to do to their loved ones.  What makes that any better?  The institute people have people who loved them too and they will not remember each other.  It’s just frustrating that Roth couldn’t have come up with a better way for them to win the fight.  If you’re going to have a good guy and a bad guy, the good guy can’t just counter the bad guy with the same thing he was doing.  It was a total cop-out.  She took her story to a place that she couldn’t get out of, so this was the only way. ]

Okay, so now let’s talk about that ending.  I’m going to be putting most of this in a spoiler, though honestly, if you’ve paid attention to how this book was created and reviewed, you can probably determine the ending anyway.  [Spoiler: I am so frustrated that she killed Tris.  I did expect it about half way through the book, but I was hoping she would do it in an epic way that at least had a big impact on the world.  But she didn’t.  I don’t feel like Tris’s death did anything for making the world a better place.  All it did was allow this “tragic” ending.  Okay, she gave up her life for Caleb’s, which is cool because he had done so many awful things to her.  But really, her death didn’t do much.  If perhaps her death helped them stop the institute from doing what they were going to do some other epic way, okay that would have been better. Or the death should have been some type of Christ archetype (I give credit to this to my husband).  In Harry Potter, Harry actually goes out and dies in the forest, but he comes back to life.  That death and rebirth has a big impact.  But Tris just dies, and for nothing.  I wish this had been done better.  And I hate getting attached to a main character and then they die.  If this is what Roth thinks is a good ending, then I do not plan to read more series from her in the future. ]

So overall I am very disappointed with this book.  There was a lot of wrap up at the end, but it wasn’t really about what the world became.  It was more about the characters (Tobias) dealing with the events of what happened.  I wish we had gotten more world wrap up.  Their immediate world changed, but they didn’t really change anything else that happened in the rest of the world.  Other experiments are still out there and don’t know what they are.  This series could have been an epic win, but in the end, all it did was epically fail.