A “rainbow baby” is a baby that is born following a miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death or infant loss.In the real world, a beautiful and bright rainbow follows a storm and gives hope of things getting better. The rainbow is more appreciated having just experienced the storm in comparison. (www.countthekicks.org.uk)

Eve is our rainbow baby and this past weekend she really showed us what that must mean for her, in her toddler way, to have an older sister who is not here. She has been saying Lila's name, it sounds like "Wiwa" and she seems to recognize her in pictures. We went to the mausoleum and she leaned up to give Lila some flowers. It was heartbreaking and amazing and devastating all in one move. I lost it this day at the mausoleum watching my amazing daughter interact with her sister the only way she can. Right now she doesn't know anything but happiness when she talks about Lila and I wish that it would always be that way for her but I know someday it will turn to sadness as well. It is unfair and unbelievable that this is the reality for my two girls, how I wish they could have known each other and be the best of friends.

Mike and I both found Thanksgiving to be very difficult this year. We had a lot of good times, the holiday itself went really well and we had a lot of fun at a friend's house. We ran the turkey trot downtown and even Evie joined in via her stroller. The days surrounding it though were filled with a lot of despair and just feeling sad. Three Thanksgivings without Lila and it is still hard, it still hurts and it still makes us question everything. The holiday is supposed to be about giving thanks, but when you lose a baby, it is sometimes hard to do this when some people in today's society give thanks for material items and all you want is to have all your children alive and healthy. I give thanks every second for my younger daughter but then I question why couldn't I have both of my kids? It is confusing and hard and just another layer of grief to deal with around the holidays. The positive moments from the past four days were good, but I am just glad Thanksgiving is over with.

Being able to send out birth announcements for Eve means everything to us as we never got to do it for Lila. We knew that we wanted to somehow include Lila on them, but struggled for many weeks on what to say. For Mike and I, we are a family of four and only three of us get to be together, not including Lila seemed so wrong to us. If she were here, Evie's birth announcements would probably say something about her big sister Lila. So why did that have to change just because she is not here? Some people see this differently and feel that including Lila's name might take away from Evie in some sense, or make it more about Lila than Evie. And so the internal conflict began on what was the right thing to do for us and our girls? Mike made the comment that we have no idea how Eve is going to feel about Lila one day and how she will deal with the loss of a sister she never got to know? But what if having Lila's name on her announcement made her proud? What if we are looking at it as only being a possible sad or confusing thing, when in turn it might be a positive one? So with that thought concept we decided we needed to do something. I looked online for a while for the right wording on how to include Lila's name, but I just was not finding it. Lucky for us we have a photographer who took Eve's pictures that was amazing to work with. Once we told her our dilemma she suggested we include the Lila stone and maybe put something on the back of the announcement. The picture below is what we came up with. The whole front of the card is all about Evie and has a collage of pictures while the back has a special little picture of a Lila stone and says "Watched over by big sister." This is what worked for us and we hope we did right by both of our girls.

Thanksgiving Weekend

Birth Announcements