The whole reason I started this blog was to put my story out there in the hope that someone somewhere might take comfort in it. I found it such a comfort to hear from people I know who have gone through the loss of a child, but when I went online looking for more I couldn't really find what I wanted. So, here's some of the diary I started for myself three weeks after Kat died. (I'm adding it in three parts over three days - not to be soap opera-ish about it, just that when I copied and pasted it to here the post wouldn't work so I'm having to type it all out and I don't have time to do it all as well as uni work and go for a swim before getting the kids from school)

It seemed like a miracle to me taht I was pregnant that very first month.

I had some very light bleeding, which I had done with both Rory and Sienna, at around the time my period was due. I also developed a very bad taste in my mouth at the same time. I suspected I may be pregnant, but I didn't even want to form the thought, let alone say it out loud. It seemed too impossible to hope that I was pregnant just like that. On Wednesday 24th June 2009 I did a pregnancy test and the result was indecisive. I could just barely make out a shadow where the positive line would go if it was there. After my shower I couldn't resist looking at the test again and it had turned to a definite positive. Bearing in mind that the instructions say to not look at it after about ten minutes because a negative result can change to positive in time, I wasn't sure if I was pregnant or not. I told Michael about it and said that I'd wait two days and do another one first thing in the morning. On the Thursday night, he had to go to a partner's meeting for work and so was getting into bed after I'd gone to sleep. I half woke up when he came in and he put his arms around me and whispered that he hoped "tomorrow said yes". Sure enough, it did.

I can't speak for Michael, other than to say that he certainly seemed very happy and excited. He said that a child was the one thing he had always wanted and never thought he would have. He told me he was very happy that I was the one he was sharing this with.

I just remember feeling very content. But also a little scared to say out loud that I was pregnant. I went ahead and announced the pregnancy anyway since it had always been my opinion that every pregnancy should be celebrated. I also never understood the reasoning of not announcing a pregnancy - among family and close friends at least - until the second trimester "just in case" of a miscarriage. I've always thought that the only thing worse than having to tell a whole heap of people that I'd just had a miscarriage would be to go through it and to have no one other than my partner and myself even know that the baby had ever existed. But this time, there was an alarm in the back of my mind every time I told someone I was pregnant. I kept telling myself that when I was pregnant with Rory I was obsessed with the idea that I was going to have a miscarriage and that the only thing that ever came of that obsession was that at the same time I was also consumed with guilt because I didn't want to surround my baby with negative thoughts. I also kept telling myself that I hoped I would never look back and say that I always knew something was wrong with this pregnancy.

I went off to the doctor to confirm the pregnancy and she referred me for an ultrasound to date it. She had the suspicion that I may have already been pregnant while still on the pill as pregnancy can be a reason for bleeding on the pill (which I had seen her about a month earlier). I knew I hadn't been pregnant a month earlier, and I told her as well, that after seeing her before I had immediately done two pregnancy tests and they were both negative. I also knew that had I been four or five weeks further along, it was unlikely that the first test would have been so very faintly positive. She referred the ultrasound anyway and I was very concerned that she decisively ordered the scan after feeling my tummy. What did she suspect?

The first ultrasound revealed that I was six weeks pregnant, due on 2nd March 2010 (about a week to ten days further along than I thought, but nowhere near the month or more that the doctor had suggested!) and that the baby was in a very low position. I was also told I had fibroids. The radiologist was appalling. He asked me twice about my positive pregnancy tests, saying "and you said the blood test was positive?" I was staring the whole time at the kidney shaped black blob on the screen that I'd seen twice before in early ultrasounds with Rory and Sienna and I knew full well to be the gestational sac. As the scan went on I was asked how old I was and whether I'd ever been told I had fibroids, which I hadn't. Throughout the scan there was silence apart from those questions. At the end, he told me that I had firboids, then pointed out the sac I'd been looking at all along and said that it looked like I had conceived but that the embryo had implanted very low and so he couldn't say whethe it was a viable pregnancy. I had to go back in three weeks - provided I was still pregnant. It was only later when I read teh ultrasound report that I found out I was carrying a single live embryo with a beating heart.

My doctor told me fibroids weren't necessarily a big concern and that babies often implanted quite low, which I had already read online. Particularly in multiple pregnancies one of the embryos will be low down. However, the doctor went on to say that the baby had plenty of room to grow until about 20 weeks. She didn't add anything to that. So I walked out thinking "what happens after 20 weeks?" My attitude was that as long as I was still pregnant all I could do was to continue as if I was having a baby some time in February or March. I couldn't go about the pregnancy as if I was definitely going to lose it. That would have driven me crazy.

Three weeks later I went in for another ultrasound and not only was I still pregnant - I no longer had fibroids! What had been diagnosed as a fibroid must have been an implantation bleed, basically a blood clot, because, as the radiologist put it, a fibroid wouldn't have disappeared. Also, the baby had moved up in the uterus so everything seemed very positive. As a matter of interest, I was given the same due date as at the first scan - the first time I'd ever had two ultrasounds give me the exact same dates.

Another three weeks later I was back at the doctor after having some light bleeding. All througout the pregnancy I'd had quite a bit of pain all over my belly and for two days before the bleeding started the pain had been bad enough to keep me awake. The day of teh bleeding I also had cramping, like period pain. If it had just been light spotting on its own I wouldn't have worried. I'd had that throughout the first trimester with Sienna and knew that alone it wasn't a big concern. But the pain worried me. So it was back to radiology yet again.

The ultrasound at 12 weeks was amazing! There was a baby inside me that looked like a baby and not a tiny white blob! She was moving her arms and legs, stretching her neck and even rolled over and mooned the camera. Michael was away for work that day and I was just so disappointed for him that he didn't get to see what I was seeing. I didn't want him to miss anything. I left that scan on an incredible high. Our baby was fine, there was no sign of any haemorrhaging, no reason for any bleeding or pain - no reason to think there was anything wrong at all. And my due date was still 2nd March. I could hardly believe that three ultrasounds had now given me the same dates.

Six weeks passed with all the normal pregnancy things happening - I was throwing up and very tired. I'd been nauseous constantly since the night before the definite positive test and had started vomiting at 8 1/2 weeks, but it was nowhere near as bad as what I'd had with both Rory and Sienna. With each of them I was sick every single day from the time it started (6 weeks with Rory, 8 weeks with Sienna) for at least 10 weeks before it eased off to every second day, then a couple of times a week and so on. I was more tired in this pregnancy than I remembered ever being with the others and was sleeping every day as well as going to bed early and going straight to sleep.

Throughout this time, I was very stressed at home with everything other than my relationship with Michael. The kids and I all had whooping cough. I was officially diagnosed with it at 10 weeks pregnant but I'd first had the "cold" at the start of the disease at about 5-6 weeks. Rory and Sienna both got it around the same time I did. The doctor knew I was pregnant and told me what I'd already read online - that whooping cough wasn't a major concern in pregnancy unless it was in the last month or so. And then it's because the mother is likely to infect the baby once it's born. The kids had been right proper snots since early March when they found out their father was moving to Canberra. They had been through such a difficult two years with our separation and my move to Armidale being obvious big events for them. They had seen their father begin a new relationship almost immediately after we separated, then I met Michael just three months after moving to Armidale (about a year after the separation). Their father had very erratic contact with them after I moved. His phone calls reduced to maybe one every two or three months and he cancelled a couple of visits - for work...or to go away for a weekend. His move to Canberra broke the kids. It was one thing too much for them to cope with. Until then I had always been able to keep them talking and bring them through the bad times. But they wouldn't talk to me anymore and their behaviour was at times disgusting. They weed on the floor - and played in it. Rory was having terrible tantrums that lasted days on end. He would be in a fit of rage, saying such things as that he wanted to slice our heads off. Sienna's attention seeking was extreme and she became mean with it, mostly towards Rory and Michael. She delighted in manipulating Rory so that he would get in trouble and she completely resented Michael doing anything other than play with her or give her cuddles (which I guess is very normal behaviour towards the step-parent in the primary residence). The only times they had been happy all year were when we moved in with Michael and when they found out I was pregnant. I'd been dreading their reactions to both of those events and was pleasantly surprised when they both reacted so positively (although Sienna's first response to the pregnancy was to burst into tears - it didn't take her long to come around though). I could only surmise that they were responding well to the four of us coming together more as a family. They were craving that stable home unit. Topping it all off, I was in the first year of my long-awaited degree. I'd made the decision to study part-time instead of full-time because I wanted to get a part-time job as well. In the end, I didn't find work and the kids turned back into a full-time job so I was pleased to only have a study load of two units a semester. I found out I was pregnant right after first semester exams. The pregnancy coincided with the units I was receiving Distinctions and High Distinctions in. So when, at 15 weeks, I crashed out and slept for three days I put it down to stress. I put it down to everything catching up with me at once. And maybe a touch of post-illness fatigue after the whooping cough. I said that I was pregnant and regularly throwing up throughout the day, had just had whooping cough and had two kids with whooping cough, I was dealing with the fallout of a choice made by the kids' father, Michael had just spent three weeks travelling for work right when I was the most sick and I was getting HDs at uni - of course I was tired. The fact that I'd started vomiting more at the same time didn't really register with me. I was a little concerned that the vomiting had suddenly gotten worse just when it had been petering off, but even so it still wasn't as bad as what I'd had with the other pregnancies and in both of them I'd still well and truly been throwing up daily at 15 weeks. The rash I broke out in at the same time was hardly a blip on my mind. It only lasted a couple of days - the first day it was barely noticeble red bumps that felt like pimples over the bottom half of my face, chest and the top half of my arms; the second day the bumps were white and pussy and the day after that they were gone. I thought I'd had a breakout of pimples and put it down to a pregnancy thing. I also had nosebleeds for the first time in my life, which I thought was from the strain of vomiting so much.

We very excitedly went off to the 18 week ultrasound expecting nothing other than to see our baby moving on the screen. We were both just happy that Michael was going to be at this one and that he would finally see some of the things I'd seen at 12 weeks. Initially that's what happened. There was our baby girl - although we couldn't tell at that point that she was a girl. She had her legs firmly closed and curled around with her feet coming back to cover up the vital bits and the cord in the way to boot. We had joked before that if we couldn't tell the sex at the ultrasoound then it must be a girl and was being modest. So we shared a smile when told that the sex couldn't be determined. She was moving quite a bit and doing such baby things as sucking on her fingers. It was the joyous experience we had been hoping for. Towards the end of the scan, the radiologist asked how certain I was of my dates. Due to the three early scans all giving the same date I knew precisely how far along I was. He told us that the baby was measuring about 16 weeks in size, when I was just over 18 weeks pregnant. The good news was that she was symmetrically small - if, for example, she had an 18-weeks sized head with a 16-weeks sized body it would have been a major concern and indicative of a serious genetic disorder. Further, we were told that after the first trimester babies grow at different rates and it was possible taht we just happened to be having the ultrasound right before a growth spurt.

Michael and I still weren't overly concerned at that point. My entire famiily if either bang on average height or less and Michael's family are all on the short side, so it made perfect sense to us that we were expecting a small baby. I just thought - cool, I'm the one giving birth to this baby, I don't mind at all if it's a bit small!