Making your own rules

Obviously our next pregnancy will be different from this last one.  We won't be doing the excited 12 week announcement, we likely won't say anything on facebook until he or she is here....at the very least we'll wait until like 30 weeks when we're well passed our loss milestone.

But it never occured to me that we can still have fun with our next pregnancy.  Like mourning practices in the Victorian Era when people were supposed to behave and dress a certain way to express their grief for a period of time, I kind of felt like we cannot be happy during our next pregnancy because if we are too happy it could be taken away.  We can't be too excited because we know too well what can happen.  We can't do the big announcements, we can't even really talk about it.

Last time I left Ryan a note on the table saying "second time's a charm"? and the U of M baby booties.  For next time I had basically just planned on saying, we're pregnant, cause you know we don't dare get excited.  But I asked him tonight, when I find out next time, do you still not want to know via phone?  I mean, before I would never have even considered telling him the news over the phone if he wasn't home, but since next time will be low key, I figured maybe it would be ok.  But he said no, no phone call and no text.  He said why don't you do something fun like last time.

I can honestly say it never occurred to me because of this silly notion that next time we have to be stoic and reserved.  Of course we'll be nervous, and the closer I get to 22 weeks the more insane with fear I will get.  But when we get pregnant again, that baby deserves to be wanted and loved.  That baby deserves to have excited parents who can't wait for them to get here and enjoy the pregnancy as much as they can.  It's like I realized today, there are no rules, we make the rules.  Our feelings will likely be conflicted, but just because we'll be excited about a new baby doesn't mean we love Kayla any less.  She'll always be our first born.

So I was thinking of cute ways to tell him next time.  I've only come up with two ideas.  The first idea is to give him his Father's Day card early if it happens soon.  He wrote in my card as if it were from Kayla, so I planned to do the same....but I could also include the pregnancy in it.  Somehow write it so she's telling him that she has a brother or sister on the way.  My second idea was to copy cat how he proposed to me.  He wrapped my ring box in a bigger box, wrapped that one in an even bigger box and then wrapped that one in a big big box.  So I could do that, and inside the last box would be the pee stick.

We were also thinking....last time we found out the sex at the ultrasound.  But maybe this next time, we could have them write it down in an envelope, and then go someplace nice and open it together.  I don't know, just tossing around ideas, but it's very liberating to realize it's up to us.  We don't have to do things exactly the same way we did before, and we can be happy when we need to be.