It's been a really busy couple of weeks. I had started feeling a little more peaceful just before I wrote last time... and then 11 days ago now I did a positive pregnancy test!

We wanted this pregnancy so much and it comes with an incredible amount of emotion. We cried when we found out. Neither happy tears or sad tears, just overwhelming emotion spilling out. I'm not as scared as I expected to be though. Michael is, but for me I feel excited and content more than anything. I have the usual fear of miscarriage that I've had in now four pregnancies, but that's about all as far as fear goes. It seems that I've separated completely this baby from Kat. I think that all along I haven't seen Kat's death as something that happened to us - it happened to Kat. And that was Kat and this baby is this baby. I am more wary of illness than I was before and I get a bit more nervous when I think ahead to the 18-20 weeks ultrasound though. Still, it's nowhere near what I was expecting to be thinking and feeling in another pregnancy. I just wish with all my heart that there was some way we could have both Kat and this baby here with us. But we can't. Kat is buried deep inside of me, she's etched in my soul and I will carry her and the experience of her with me forever. My forever-baby.

I'm feeling so different than I ever have in any other pregnancy. I'm about 6 weeks and have had waves of nausea most days, but with all the others I was feeling sick all day every day by now. There's one very big difference this time to when I was pregnant with Kat too - I don't have the nervousness in the back of my mind that I had last time every time I told someone I was pregnant. God, I hoped so much that I would never look back and say that I always knew something was wrong in that pregnancy, but I was so nervous about it. That's not there this time, apart from (as I said before) the usual fear of miscarriage in early pregnancy. (Things twist around in circles so much! I wonder if that's the same for everyone?) I'm still swimming and/or walking each day as well and it's given me a whole new mental attitude that I've never had before. I always stop as soon as something gets hard or hurts but when I swim I just keep going no matter how much I want to stop. And now I don't find myself wanting to stop. I like to keep going and I want to keep going. It's spilling over into my everyday life and I really like it.

When I was first pregnant with Rory, Kat and now this baby (Sienna was a complete shock - if these things ever happened with her I didn't notice and I don't remember, I was too busy with an 8 month old baby!), I had strange but beautiful experiences. With Rory I saw a mental picture of my mum (from here on I will use the word "image" rather than mental picture). It had to have been around about when he was conceived, well and truly before I found out I was pregnant. I closed my eyes to go to sleep and saw an image of mum holding a baby wrapped in the christening blanket she made for my brother. Then a couple of weeks later I'd had a song stuck in my head all day without really paying any attention to what the song was. I stopped and thought about it and I was singing "Ziggy Played Guitar" - and I felt so strongly right then that I was pregnant. I'd said for ages that while I was pregnant I was going to call the baby Ziggy until he or she was born. I did a test the next day and it was positive. With Kat I also "saw" mum. I saw an image of mum leading a very old (older than anyone I had ever seen) lady to me by the hand. I "said" to this lady "are you Kathryn?" and she nodded and then melted into my belly, which I then "saw" covered with roses. A while later I had the song "Hey Jude" stuck in my head, especially the line about "under your skin" and I don't know why but as soon as I thought those song words I just knew I was pregnant. Also, Jude was one of my favourite boys names and we had picked it as a middle name to go with Dylan if we had a boy. After Kat died I had a song stuck in my mind that has a line "I am Sagittarius" and really felt that our next baby would be born under that star sign. I also heard the word April when I mentally asked when I would get pregnant - which was out by a few days! It was 27 March when I did the positive test. (Before having Kat I had "asked" when I would be pregnant and saw a mental image of myself on a sunny day in June, which didn't make any sense when we lived in a really cold town, but then I went out walking one day in June, it was actually sunny and it felt like "that day" - sure enough, that's when I got pregnant) A few days before I did the test I closed my eyes to go to sleep and saw two babies in a cot - one a sleeping newborn down the end of the cot and one a bit older (but still a baby) sitting up the top watching the newborn sleep. I opened my eyes and told Michael I want a butterfly sticker on the inside of the cot when we have another baby. I'll put it up the top on the side I saw the baby sitting up. Finally, for a day or so before doing the test I was singing "From Little Things Big Things Grow" and it just felt like the words were telling me something. At the same time, I was trying to ignore any signs that I was pregnant. I so didn't want to get my hopes up only to be disappointed and because I'd "heard" the word April I was telling myself it was going to be next month.