It's the weekend of the butterflies.

This could make me sad, but instead I'm feeling really peaceful today and enjoying the memory.

The actual date is tomorrow, but it was this weekend last year that we went over to Michael's parents' house and we all went up to see Jon English playing an outdoor night concert in the Warrumbungles. I had a simply wonderful weekend. I felt that the seven of us - Michael and I, the kids and Kat and Michael's parents - were a family. It was the word that kept coming to my mind, along with connected. I felt so incredibly connected to Kat. I felt the kids connected to Michael and his parents. His mum and I were so excited about Kat and were enjoying looking at a pregnancy website she had found. At that stage I was starting to think that a virus had interrupter Kat's growth and that she would always remain that few weeks small for her age - which in the long run would be nothing at all. I was worried about the lack of amniotic fluid and what it meant for her lung development but I thought there would be something the doctors could do for her after she was born. We were worried about her, but I was also the most optimistic out of any stage in the pregnancy. And she was Kat. It had been confirmed from the amnio that we were having a girl. She wasn't "the baby" anymore. She was Kat. She was real.

As we sat outside in a beautiful spot in the Warrumbungles, all of us together eating a picnic dinner and listening to music, a mass of orange butterflies appeared right in front of me. Rory and I were sitting together and the two of us were captivated by them. As I watched they started to gather around my feet. I still have no explanation for why, but I looked at those butterflies fluttering around my feet and it felt like it was connected to Kat. Of course, the next (and only other) time I would see a mass of orange butterflies was in our backyard after her funeral. A single one came into our house and I just KNEW it was her. Thus began the butterfly connection.

When we got home on the Sunday night I finally got out the book we had bought for her a couple of weeks earlier and read to her. It was the book of cat poems that Cats is based on. I read to her and she kicked and kicked and kicked. It was the most she had kicked in weeks and weeks and I thought that everything was going to be OK. Later that night I got my Cats DVD out and watched it. The next morning I woke up from dreaming of Kat as a grown woman standing on a dark stage singing Memory. I was positive for one moment that she had died. I immediately pushed the thought out of my mind and continued to feel the happy optimism that had built over the weekend. In hindsight I never felt her move again. Very occasionally I would feel... something... that I thought was a small kick. I continued to feel them for a few weeks after she was born, so I don't know what it was.

I've always believed that Kat had something to do with my mind that last week. The last ultrasound we went into was the only one we had that I expected to see her heart beating. All the others, even the three in the first trimester, I went into absolutely convinced that there would be no heart beat. Before that last one though I spent the day getting more and more nervous, thinking that I was imagining the worst. I was imagining that she wouldn't have grown a full two weeks' worth since the last one. That there was even less amniotic fluid. That there were more pockets of fluid on her body. But underlying all of it, I was looking forward to seeing her heart beat. I was expecting to see it. We sat in the waiting room at the hospital seeing people carry their babies into the paediatric clinic and saying "that will be us soon". I have always believed that Kat wouldn't let me entertain the idea that she was lying dead inside me.

Since Kat died I've struggled, more so in the beginning than now but still now to some extent, with the hope that we held for our girl. I've resented it knowing that as soon as I contracted that virus her fate was sealed and we had no way of knowing it. I had no way of knowing that something inside me had attacked my precious baby girl. But today I find myself remembering that last weekend that she was alive, remembering the hope and cherishing it. I cherish that so close to the end and all that came afterwards we had that one happy weekend.