World Prematurity Day- nearly 4 years on

Today is world prematurity day.

The first photo of Ada, born at 30 weeks

Day like this one, as well as miscarriage awareness, always make me stop and pause. A lot can, and did, happen in the past 5 years, and while I am forever changed by the miscarriages and Ada's premature birth, they are now distant enough from me to no longer be a source of pain. Instead my experiences are a tool to help others.

Finding our family's rhythm

Life has lost it's rhythm lately and instead has turned to speedy rushing with sudden stops and starts. 

I've been feeling a bit lost, afloat, this year, trying to make family life work for us in a way that is not just rushing through life.

Our weeks have no consistency, which is mainly down to my work as a freelance NZSL interpreter and now, caker. The hours are flux and changing, which I knew when I got into both professions, but now with kids it is too hard to sustain.

Dear Hunter, at 10 months

Dear Hunter

From the very beginning you have been so different to your sister, and you have shown us that you are well and truly your own person.

In the early days I wrote a post about how you were an easy baby, and the transition to two kids had been easier than I expected. I now realise that this is because you couldn't move yet!

Us

When two people love each other, they share their joy, multiply their hope

(words from a poem I wrote for our wedding.)

Those early days after a first baby is born are a pivotal point in a marriage. You turn from facing inwards towards each other, and open up the circle, to look down at another. You stare and are consumed by this new being, and by the time, weeks or months later, when you finally look up at each other again, everything is different. Months, years go by, and you add in another child, or two, and you are stretched further from each other as you welcome in more new life.

They share their pain, divide their sorrow

That bittersweet feeling of knowing you are done having babies.

The first months after Hunter was born, I longed for another baby. I was on fire, I was winning at montherhood with a toddler and a baby. I longed for him not to be my last.

Looking back, that was probably hormones, mixed with those 'easy days' of newborn life. Don't get me wrong- newborns aren't easy- but Hunter felt pretty easy in comparison to Ada's newborn days. I wasn't working, Ada was at care part time, we were given lots of meals and Hunter didn't require much more than snuggles and milk.

Since then, as Hunter has grown and become busier, as I've gone back to work and running a household, I have felt and immense stretch and have met the limits of my capacity nearly every day.