Starting again...

As those of you that have followed my previous blog... all 4 posts.. you may have noticed that i was particularly dreadful at writing.. This is partly due to the summer and being a busy mother to 2 children..
I am making the effort again...
I'll start with an Intro..

My name is Jane... I am married to dh and have been for almost 6 years (wow it doesn't feel that long). We have 2 beautiful children a boy of almost 4 and a little girl that has not long turned 2. The "ideal" family.... well that's how it may seem on the surface...

We are also a family that is missing 3 members.... 3 angels that left us. Our first angel came as a shock... I didn't even know i was pregnant... (how can that be i hear you say). Quite simply i was pp from ds and got pregnant before i became aware i was fertile again... oops... How did i find out i was pregnant... I started bleeding... and i bled and bled and bled.. and being a naiive pp firsttime mother i assumed that this was what happened when AF finally showed up.... how wrong i was..... Dh found me passed out in a pool of blood... I had a "late" mc... a baby that i didn't know about... a baby that i never got the chance to love.... and that really hurts. If you knew me irl you would know how much i love my babies when i'm pregnant... they are loved from the moment i can see the second line... probably even before :D
We were overjoyed when a few short months later we saw those 2 lines again.... due to the previous loss i was scanned early in the pregnancy and we were elated to see not one but 2 little tiny blobs with tiny flickering hearts... And equally devastated when a few short weeks later i bled again... and we said goodbye to two more angels.
Devastated would describe me in the weeks after that... torn apart.. in limbo... We decided to put a hold on increasing our family... we had a case of the what if's... what if there was a reason that i couldn't carry them... what if there was a congenital problem.... Our doctor sent "sample" (what a cold word) for pathological investigation... If there was something to find we would know...

Mother nature had other ideas... and despite being really careful and following all the rules of tta.... i concieved our rainbow baby... 8 weeks later. DD was definitely concieved out of love... i think dh and i were clinging to each other at that time.. we hurt so hard... 9 months of sheer terror later I delivered our beautiful daughter at a fantastic 9lbs1oz. Our joy was complete... we could put the sadness of our lost angels behind us and focus on the future... or so we thought...

Dd developed (thank goodness) a rather bad milk allergy at the age of 2 months.. which warrented a trip to the allergy specialist and dietician when she turned 6 months (exclusive nursing on a milk free diet until then). Why am i so pleased that our dd had a milk allergy.. because without that we probably wouldn't have her now... An incidental finding on a blood test at 7 months of age revealled that our daughter had Infant Acute lymphocytic leukemia with MLL gene rearrangement (4:11). Our baby had cancer.

This past 18 months have been hell on earth... I have seen my little girl go through things i wouldn't wish on my worst enemy... But i have also seen her fighting spirit and watched how she just enjoys life.. taking every day as it comes and living it to the full.. I could learn alot from watching her.

So that is how our "ideal" family is.... on the surface we look happy and content... but underneath.... there is turbulence... sadness...