Fall has arrived

The past 2 days it has been mostly cloudy and bit cooler.  It feels as if fall has arrived.  I generally love the fall.  I always have especially since Mattie was born on September 21st... just before fall arrives.  With her auburn hair, I have always loved shooting pictures of her with pumpkins and fall colored leaves.  This fall, however, I am filled with the added emotions of Julia.  It's amazing how sights, smells, experiences can shoot you back instantly in time and you can relive the past in a moment.  The other day I was driving to my friend's house who lives in Menlo Park.  I took 280 to get there which is not that unusual.  However, it was mid morning and it was fall.  I was unexpectedly transported back to a year ago driving to Lucile Packard Children's hospital.   It felt very real.  All these images flooded my head... from walking through the front doors into the hospital, to walking into the NICU, the PICN, or the CVICU... all the images came at once.  I could see my Julia laying in a hospital bassinet.  I visioned approaching her and rubbing her head as I said hello to her for the first time that day.  It all came back in a flash.

Today, I took down all the fall decorations from the attic and decorated the house for fall.  I love decorating.  It makes the house feel cozy.  Tonight, however, as I was doing dishes, I was all of a sudden hit with the memory of all the mixed feelings I had a year ago as I was (what I thought) 7 weeks away from delivery.  The feelings of anticipation, of fear, of wondering how our lives were going to turn out.  I wish I could say it was a joyous time but it was not.  I just remember being pregnant and thinking to myself how disappointing that this was most likely my last pregnancy and that I didn't really get to enjoy it.  I had so many questions.  Would she be healthy? What about her heart defect? When would she have surgery? Would she be able to breastfeed?  How high functioning would she be?  Would she talk or walk?  How is life with her going to affect my marriage and Mattie.  (Though I was also devoting energy to thinking at the time of the ways she could positively affect our life and Mattie's life.  I was really trying to gear myself up.   But I was scared.)  It was about now a year ago that I was transferred from my regular OBgyn to a high risk Stanford doctor and all my care was transferred to LCPH.  I was going in weekly for non stress tests.  It was a scary time.   At the time, I was not feeling like I could really "nest" for Julia (the was so much uncertainty and mixed emotions) so I instead nested by decorating my house with pumpkins.   Today, the decorations took me back.  I bet they will every year.

Fall... it's going to be a rough one this year.  Next week is Julia's 11 month birthday.  Mattie's kindergarten pumpkin patch field trip is on that day.  I'm sure I'll be writing about how it went.  Because I'm the field trip coordinator, I'm sure I'll be very consumed with the trip running smoothly.  So that will probably be good.   But her 1 year birthday is approaching and I can't get her off my mind. Mattie has been drawing more pictures of Julia, too.  It's like she "knows."  She has also been talking about Julia more or including her name in her play.  (Mattie often will play "family" with dolls or stuffed animals and have 2 sisters, one being Mattie and one being Julia.)

Fall.  For me, this year, it will be a melancholy season, a season of reflection, a season of remembrance, a season of sadness, all intermixed with the joys of pumpkins, with photos with fallen leaves, of a little girl with auburn hair... it's just that I once had 2 little girls with orange hair and now I have one.