I'm still here...

I know I haven't updated in a while. I kept meaning to, and then I start doing something else, or my thoughts get interrupted, and I just never get through an entire post without scraping it. I can't believe Eden would be going on 5 months already. Time goes by so incredibly fast. They said it goes by faster as you age, but I guess I never believed it when I was a kid.

I've been keeping pretty busy the last couple months. I've helped spread the word about folic acid vs. folate more than a handful of times, I've completed another class in school and  trying to get my last three classes completed by the end of June (then I'll be able to graduate), I've managed to somewhat upkeep my eBay store, and I'm still pumping and donating milk...all while being Mama to a crazy toddler.

The pumping is going really well at this point. I wake up in the mornings and pump while my mom and dad keep Brooklyn at their house for me. When I'm done, she comes home and nurses pretty much all day. After she goes to bed, I usually pump once more before I go to bed myself. I'm getting around 20-30oz a day still with only the two pumps (as long as I get enough rest), and when I manage to pump 3-4 times, I end up getting 30-35oz. I've currently donated over 2575 ounces so far (that's over 20 gallons!!), and I have another 1100 ounces in my freezer currently, 700 of which I'm donating to a couple more mamas next week. I never imaged I'd still be pumping this long postpartum! I knew I'd decided to try pumping to donate milk very soon after we found out about Eden's anencephaly, but since I had so much trouble pumping when Brooklyn was an infant, I figured I wouldn't be able to get much milk for very long. I thought maybe I'd end up pumping a couple weeks or a month tops.

A couple weeks ago, the day before Easter, I received a bright orange package in the mail. It was a photobook from Shutterfly, and inside were all the pictures of Eden I have in her album on my personal Facebook page. There were all the pregnancy photos, and the maternity pictures, all the pictures I had uploaded of Eden, and even all the memorial photos. It was amazing and perfect, and I had no idea who sent it to me. I spent the day wondering who could have taken so much time to create such a precious gift for us, and later that day, I found out it was a good friend of mine! She spent hours on that book, and it means so much to me that she not only remembered that we had announced Eden's pregnancy around Easter time, but that she took the time to create a book so perfect for us. She even included a page dedicated to my Mema. She "shared" the book with me, and so I was able to order more copies of the book that James and I plan on giving our mothers for Mother's Day.

Last week Amy (the one who was my doula) came by to visit for a bit, and to bring me the tiles that she had made for us with Eden's footprints on them. They are absolutely beautiful, and I'm so grateful to have these to cherish forever. She also brought me a disk with some pictures and a some videos of Eden on it. She had several videos of Eden's little cries (I

Eden gave us her first smile...

forgot how many different times she actually cried!), and she even captured a moment I had somehow already forgotten - Eden's first smile. That baby girl gave us so, so much in the short time she was here. She cried for us, she poop and peed for us, she smiled at me, we got skin-to-skin time together, and she even got to taste my milk. I miss Eden so much, and I think of her everyday. Surprisingly, Brooklyn talks about her often...I probably sound nuts, but I'm sure she sees her sister, and I think she even talks to her sometimes. I notice it when she's playing alone sometimes, she'll pause in her play and act like she conversing and interacting with another child, and then she'll look at the wall where Eden's pictures are. And sometimes she'll look out the window and point while saying Eden, as if she's trying to get me to see her too.

I'll try to get some pictures of the tiles soon - we need to find plate holders that go on the wall to display them first. Oh, and James has his own blog now, and he wrote a post for Eden a couple weeks ago.