overdue

This post is long overdue...but I just didn't really feel like committing myself to it, for reasons I'll explain below. Most of our family and friends know by now (I hope so anyway!) that I am expecting baby #4 (a girl) to our family. This may not be surprising, but the fact that I'm actually due on April 12th (Easter Day) might be. But since I've delivered all my babies early (5 weeks, 3 weeks, and 10 days) it could be any day now***.

***Well, I should've posted this sooner, but I just couldn't get myself to do it. I feel like I'm somehow going to jinx the situation by speaking about it. Olivia Alice was born on March 25th. So far she's doing fine. We're still waiting for test results. The kids are loving having a baby in the house again. For Dre and me its been good in some ways, and really hard in other ways. But its nice to have a smooshy, lovable baby to distract all of us.***

Before you start counting dates in your head, we found out I was expecting back in August, so we knew while we were in the hospital with Gavin. Obviously this wasn't "planned". And as you can imagine, it has been very emotional and complicated for us. I don't want to get into too many details, but sufficeth to say, it is hard to celebrate a life when you are mourning a death. Of course there is a small piece of us that is excited to hold and love a little baby again, but this is overshadowed by our fears and grieving at the moment.

Gavin's liver condition was genetic, therefore this baby has the same chances of being born with Alpha-1...25% that she won't have it at all, 50% that she will be a carrier, 25% that she will have it. Although having Alpha-1 doesn't mean you will need a liver transplant (Gavin's condition was at the worst end of the spectrum), it is still obviously a scary thing for us. They will test the baby as soon as she is born, and we'll have results in 2-6 weeks. Honestly, I feel as if I'm marching to the gallows and I won't know until I get there if I will be pardoned. And spending time in a hospital is pretty much the last thing I'd rather do right now. I don't know how I am going to be affected by all of this, but Im not looking forward to it at all. It is going to be a very sensitive and hard situation for us, and generally, we don't really like talking about it, and I'm not sure that will change anytime soon.

I do think that having this baby will help us in our grieving in some ways, at the very least by giving us something to concentrate on. But this is not going to "make it all better". I suspect that there will not be a dramatic change in our grieving. We are still going to feel the horrible pain of not having Gavin, perhaps even more acutely than before. So we just hope that everyone remains sensitive to our grieving process, and our future fears, even while trying to celebrate this new life.