Today marks what would be Aiden’s third birthday. We still miss him every day. It’s nice to know we’re not the only ones who still think of him. I know a few of you still visit this site from time to time, and for that I thank you. We appreciate your thoughts and prayers, not only for us and for Aiden, but for everyone who has lost a child. It’s still hard, but there is still light at the end of the tunnel for us, and you each are part of that light. Thank you.

If you wish to do something in rememberance of Aiden (or any child who is not with us) please help make the life of a living child a bit happier by donating to Toys for Tots.

Thank you again.

We miss you and we love you Aiden (and our other little one who we did not get to meet).

Today is  Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness day again. Now, we’re on both sides of that. We have lost a pregnancy, and an infant. The pain of each is still real, the wound never heals, merely scabs over some. It doesn’t take much to tear that scab away. If you know someone who has lost a child, before or after birth, let them know you remember and think of them. They need to know.

Aiden has his own domain. I’ve moved this blog over to the new site, and I’ll soon be putting up his pictures here as well. It may take a bit to get all the kinks worked out, but considering my habit of playing with things, and thereby breaking them, on my regular site, I thought it would be best to set up a sepertate site for Aiden, so those who want to would always be able to find his site.

These has been an interesting one for me. A lot of emotions have resurfaced because of different things that are going on. Work has been rough, but I’ve started a new “spare time” job, which kind of makes things at the “real job” more difficult. Chris and Heather Davis had their son Jakob this week, which in some ways opened the wound, but in others helped to heal it a bit more. Along with that we have friends who will soon be moving to new homes and starting new chapters in their lives. I’ve noticed that every now and then, my life seems to make a major shift. I think that’s happening now. I suspect the next year will be more significant than I can possibly anticipate. The last year has been a very difficult one, but I hope and pray this year will see the balance.

Thank you to those who still check back here now and then, and thank you to all of those who have loved the three of us this past year. We would not have made it without you.

Thank you all.

I miss you Aiden.

We’ve prepared some documents to take to the hospital with us… two are signs, one is our birthplan, and one is a contraction tracking worksheet. They are all in PDF format. Hopefully people may find them useful.
Birth Plan
Contraction Tracking sheet
Do Not Disturb
Learning to Breastfeed

Nicole and I have both frequented PregnancyLounge.com, it had a very active user-base and was generally close knit and friendly, as well as having good information. They did have some policies that were a little annoying, such as forbidding any posting of URL’s at all because it might compeat with their advertising. But these sorts of things are understandable, as running something of this sort is hard work, and a popular site costs quite a bit of money to keep up. However, a few weeks ago, a post from the admins appeared saying anyone with a signature file with a url in it would be banned for 30 days if the signature was not removed within 24 hours. This seemed questionable to me, both for the length of the ban, and the short notice. Granted, the terms of use clearly express the ban on posting URLs but, many people who used that site, used tickers, and some of those tickers were very subtle in their inclusion of the URL.
Two days ago however, the site suddenly went to a subscription format, in which you had to pay $15 for a membership in order to post at all. This was done with no notice whatsoever. It seems as if even the moderators were not notified. The site admins claimed this was due to a problem with spammers (a problem we can all identify with), but the suddenness of it strikes me as odd. On a board like that, people develop mini-communities and form friendships. By making this change with no notice, it seems that people who communicated regularly through that board, would be forced to pay the subscription fee, or else not be able to communicate with people they’d grown close to. Nicole is starting to look at other pregnancy forums, but we are both dissapointed in the way things seem to have been handled over at Pregnancy Lounge.
Keep in mind, that these opinions are based on limited information, as the site is “unavailable at the moment while we are testing some functionality.” So I haven’t been able to find out more.

There’s a new poll.

This one has a bar-type timeline:

Since we’ve decided we’re going to decorate The Pickle’s room with Curious George, I thought I should make a new baby ticker to reflect this:

Once again, the code can be found at http://grendel.morydd.net/babygeorge.phps