I haven't completed the thought that's been brewing in the back of my mind which I'm about to write down, so I don't really know yet where this post is going to end up.

Last week Kat's due date rolled around for the second time since she died. I've never considered 20 November to be her birthday; it was three months before her time and she was too little to have survived. Her body, her journey towards life was interrupted.

I didn't blog about it. I didn't put it on facebook. But I did make her a cake. It was a heart-shaped white chocolate and raspberry cake and Michael was the only other person who knew its significance. I didn't want to tell the kids. I want to be able to include Kathryn in our family without canonising her. I don't want her up on a pedestal. I don't want everything to do with her to take on a hushed, reverential tone and make Sienna cry. I just wanted to make my daughter a birthday cake and share it with our family.

I look at Caira now and I never - EVER - think that if Kat had lived, Caira wouldn't be here. I have heard other women who have been through this say that about their youngest child. They say that as much as they miss the baby who died, they know they wouldn't have had X if that baby was still here and they wouldn't be without X. Those women are a lot further, in terms of time, away from the loss of their babies than I am. They tell me that it took them years to reach the point of "being able" to say that. I truly don't believe I ever will and neither does Michael. It's true, we hadn't planned to have another baby after Kat. Even though as a kid/teenager I had always wanted four children and I feel extremely blessed to have now had those four children, we only wanted and planned to have one more child. But I look at Caira and I wish that we had her big sister who had just turned 1 here too. I wish Kat had been born alive and well and that a month later we had been completely shocked and a little bit horrified to discover I was pregnant again and had our baby girls 9 months apart.

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We went to my brother's house yesterday.

Recapping, my brother's first response to the death of my daughter was to book a flight from Darwin to be with me. When Dad told me he was coming I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding. I so wanted my family to come to me but I didn't put any expectation into it. When I saw him at my front door I flew into his arms and sobbed.

My brother, sister in law and niece have just moved from Darwin and now live about an hour and a half away from us. I haven't lived this close to him since I was 8. Today is his birthday so we went up to see them yesterday. We all had such a beautiful day. He played with the kids in his usual fashion - dangling them upside down and taking them to look for snakes and to the park in equal measure. The kids loved every second of it. An orange butterfly stopped by to visit too. It fluttered past them, landed on a rock and stayed there.