One for the Books

this past month was really "one for the books."

june 5. noah's first birthday.

june 11. my husband's birthday.

the unbelievable anticipation waiting for miles to arrive.

june 15. the birth of a son.

june 18. the first anniversary of our firstborn's death.

not to mention, just plain 'ol, crazy life with a newborn. 

it's been filled with the wildest of terrors, the purest of joys, the deepest of sorrows and the highs of love.

and sleep deprivation.

there's no way i can share all the complexities of these emotions, and our experiences with them, in one simple blog post. but what i do want to say is: we are still grieving. even with all the beauty and wonder that miles has brought into the world, i miss noah.

you may have had a fleeting thought that maybe i was done with the blogging, and therefore have 'finished the grief journey.' and although i believe the harshest, most intense part of our grief is over, it's still not over. 

so i will continue to write. to share my heart. to try and make sense of a world where one butler baby is alive and the other two aren't. 

you'll hear the story of miles' late, yet fast and furious, arrival. 

i'll write about why it's so difficult to talk about baby isaac. 

i'll try to put into words the paralyzing, insanity-making fear that accompanys welcoming a living baby, after knowing only how it feels to hold two dead ones. 

we're beginning a new chapter, but it's the same story.

and the theme of this new chapter can be summed up by one unbelievable experience...

before we could go home from the hospital with miles, he had to pass some weird car seat test where they monitored his oxygen levels while he sat for 90 minutes in his car seat. so bizarre. i had never in my life heard of it. after they kind of sprung it on us, the next thing we knew we were blindly following two nurses to where it would take place. 

as we walked, i began to recognize the all-too-familiar route. we were heading to the NICU. oh my god. the last time we were there was with our noah ... when our world began to rock and crumble.

i almost couldn't breathe. the horror-filled memories flooded back. 

but not only were we back in the NICU, we were led right into noah's old room. 

i know. it's insane.

and miles proceeded to get hooked up to the very same monitoring machines his big brother was hooked up to.

way too familiar.

john and i were stunned. pissed. anxious. and about crawling out of our skin to get out of there.

as we waited the grueling 90 minutes alone in the room with miles, my husband and i had a "not from us, so must be God" type thought -

with our healthy son sleeping peacefully in his car seat, God, right here and right now, was making something new. 

yes, baby miles is, in and of himself, "something new" obviously. but it was more than that. God was taking an evil, awful situation and working good into it before our very eyes.

what happened with noah can never be erased from existance. that NICU room where we experienced hell is still there, but with miles added in, there was hope and joy that wasn't there before. and that hope and joy was sitting right alongside the fear and pain.

the very same room. two polar opposite experiences inhabiting the same space.

that's my life. 

our wildly creative God can make miraculously beautiful things out of absolute garbage. 

miles is a testimony of that. we all are.

i can't wait to tell miles that, for 90 minutes, he shared the same room as his big brother. 

the only place on earth they overlapped.