#dayeleven

Seeing a little boy today at the park on what looked like his first bike being pushed by his dad with him running frantically behind shouting words of encouragement made me smile but a wave of grief just hit me.

The realisation of Not having our first daughter here running next to me jumping in the puddles in her wellies and rain mac on just like I always imagined as I walked past them with our rainbow in the pram.

Takes me back to the earlier days when I was pregnant with Violet and imagined all the things we’d be doing together. When those images don’t happen your whole world falls apart, ours fell apart withinminutes.

I’ve come to realise that this is going to be our life forever with everything that we see and everything that our rainbow does too knowing that one of our children will never get the opportunity.

I can’t remember what my life was like before grief, can you?

You learn to live with the pain and heartache every single day. Remember as always ‘you are not alone’ there’s always someone walking a similar path.

Be kind always just because it’s two years down the line doesn’t mean to say grief has packed its bags and gone.

It doesn’t mean to say that we aren’t hurting every day of our lives.

It doesn’t mean to say you can now stop asking ‘how we are.

It doesn’t mean to say you can’t talk about our children.

And it doesn’t mean to say that we are fixed it means behind the faces we are dealing with a life time of grief and we are still learning to live with the new normal.

The Reason Why We Kept Our Rainbow Baby Private

After a very long 9 months we welcomed to the world our rainbow baby Everly Hope born on 11.01.19 after a very tough year losing Violet and then a very fearful year of pregnancy after loss our rainbow is here and we have certainly been blessed by little Violet.

Your probably wondering why we kept our pregnancy quite the reason being because you live in constant fear. It’s certainly been a hard path of ‘Pregnancy after loss’ to walk, living in constant fear, wondering if you will bring your baby home or will it happen again as well as grieving for your child that is no longer here. Re visiting the place where we walked out of empty handed knowing full well in 9 months (hopefully and I say hopefully because I know this doesn’t always happen and it can happen multiple times) you would be walking out with another one of your children.

Sitting in the same place patiently waiting to be seen by our consultant every week is really difficult emotionally and mentally. Coping with grief during these times is difficult and carrying on living a life is also mentally draining as well as being pregnant. The comments we received never helped in fact most were pretty hard to handle “it’ll never happen again” or “it never happens to the same person twice” – it does. Me being pregnant again was amazing but it was difficult when asked “first baby?” No second I’m pretty sure I don’t have to explain what was coming next.

The milestone of when Violet passed away would soon be creeping up on us for us there was no other part of our pregnancy with Violet it was the last part and that’s what makes it so hard.

Losing Violet has made us stronger parents but now having Everly in our lives has made us even stronger.

We are so in love with Everly and can’t wait to start making memories just like we have we Violet our family of 4 is now complete ✨

Ashley, Grace, Violet & Everly xox