Lucky Ducky

What a great week! I have won stuff from two of my favourite digital scrapbook sites! I won a Memory Makers journaling book from the wearestorytellers.com blog and this fun kit from weedsandwildflowers.com. If you ever check out my layouts at Immortality Art, you would soon realize that I almost always scrapbook with stuff from these 2 sites, so I am totally psyched!

I was thinking about my nieces this morning. They are both six. My sister Angela got pregnant first, then six weeks later Hayley (whose son is the same age as Superboy) was pregnant. Six weeks after her, I got pregnant too. (An amazing feat considering I had only been ovulating once or twice a year for the eight years since my eldest had been born.) It was such a novelty to be pregnant together, I went up to visit them and we were fully immersed in our expectant states. I was about 16 weeks and felt Kalila's first movements as we preggo sisters sat together. She was saying hi to her cousins. Her belly buddies.

My sisters decided to come back to Calgary with us for a visit and to shop for maternity clothes. My poor husband had to make that 800km drive with 3 preggo ladies and 3 small boys. I am sure there were never more bathroom stops made on any road trip ever!

We spent our short days together shopping in maternity stores, playing card games and eating junk food. What's the point of being preggo if you can't get good and fat?!? At one store, the shop girls were quite taken with the 3 preggo sisters. They thought that I was the youngest (I am the oldest!) and more pregnant than I was, I was thrilled. I bought the very first pair of non-panel maternity jeans they had in the city, and a gorgeous wrap shirt that I have worn for the last 3 babies as well.

It was one of the happiest times of my life. I just knew that I was going to have my long awaited girl. And I had no inkling that my whole world would implode in a few short weeks.

They were still born at six week intervals. But Kalila was first, not last; dead, not alive. And instead of tears of pure joy attending all of their births, I cried bittersweet, mixed tears of joy and utter sorrow at each of their births.

I adore my nieces, neither of them are terribly patient with my affections, but if I could I would wrap them up in my arms for hours at a time. They were to be my daughter's bosom friends, her forever playmates, her cousins. All of us imagined the holidays we would spend together watching them play, seeing their triplet faces light up at the presents under the Christmas tree or covered in chocolate after the Easter egg hunt. We wondered how they would work out the problems of being 3, if one cousin would end up feeling left out. But one of them is missing. And her absense is always felt most keenly when we are all together. When there are 2 little girls, instead of 3.

I miss my daughter. I miss my nieces too. One of them, E, just lost her first tooth this week. I so wish I was there so that I could see her gap-toothed smile! E calls me Auntie Ducky, so named because of my rubber duck covered bath robe that I wore when she was small. A has already lost a few teeth and I missed those too. And I am reminded, in those darling, gap-toothed smiles, of my daughter and what might have been. A Christmas morning photo of 3, gap-toothed girls giggling by the tree.