Hellobee

As of very early this morning, at 12:44 am, I will have a five-year-old. Five years. It feels like it flew by, but it was also sooo full of memories, good times, crazy times, sad things, and everything in between. LeLe was the little rainbow baby that came into my life and gave me the chance to be a mother to her. She was so little when she was born, just a tiny squish. My greatest memory of all time is pushing her out and being able to hold her for the first time. She was perfect and she immediately pooped all over everything, which should have been a premonition of how strong willed she is. And now here we are five years later.

The other day we saw a girl in the grocery store that was probably about 6-years-old and she was wearing a grey sweatshirt with little white dots and a rainbow colored zipper pull. It was the same sweatshirt that LeLe had as a tiny baby. I remember seeing it in Carters when I was around six months pregnant, and knowing that I had to have it for my little girl. It was one of the first things I bought for her and every time she wore it, I was so happy inside. All of these intense memories came flooding back when I saw this other girl wearing the same sweatshirt. It is really easy to forget old things, memories that fade and are replaced with others, but that sweatshirt represented everything I hoped for when I was pregnant with my rainbow baby.

On the night she was born, I had been induced because her fluids were so low. My specialist had told the midwives I was seeing that I had to be induced immediately because of LeLe’s heath concerns. She was still moving a lot, but if we had waited a few more days, it may have been a different outcome. Labor was hard, extremely intense, and scary. The room was filled with staff because of the weird issues she and I had with the placenta and umbilical cord. My heart-rate dipped when they put in the epidural and I had to be given adrenaline to get it back up. Mr. Cereal forgot to eat all day and ended up with a migraine as a result. There was so much commotion during the pushing and the aftermath because LeLe’s cord detached from my placenta almost immediately. The whole experience didn’t seem too scary at the time, but when I think back about it, I see how delicate it all was and how lucky we are.

The day we left the hospital, Mr. Cereal went to get the car around and bring the carseat up to our room. I waited with LeLe, cradling her in a window singing a Foreigner song to her. This moment, the first she and I had had alone, I will never forget. I’d been waiting for her for so long and she was everything I’d hoped for. I dressed her in a tiny white outfit and carefully covered her hands with her mittens and her head with a knitted hat my sister-in-law made her. I sat in the backseat with her the whole way home, touching her face with my fingers and trying not to freak out. The next few weeks were a blur, and the next few years are too. But we’ve made some amazing memories. I am so lucky to be her mom and to have her in my life. My little rainbow baby is my little rainbow girl. Five years old.