Dear Andrew,

I have so many emotions with this pregnancy.

Grief at losing you.

Guilt at tying to have another baby so shortly after losing you.

Guilt for this baby.  Guilt that they aren't getting the same excitement that we had with you.

A touch of excitement for this baby but then the guilt comes back because should I be excited while still grieving for you?

Fear that something is going to go wrong again and I'll have to go through all of those horrible raw emotions all over again.

So the three are fear, guilt, and grief.  Which is sad because a new life should mean excitement, hope, and love.  While your father and I love this baby there is such a complexity of emotion that was absent in your pregnancy.  The naïve excitement of this pregnancy just isn't there.

Your father and I were talking about this baby's big ultrasound in a little over a week.  With you we were so excited.  We never really worried that anything would be wrong.  With this baby we can't even say everything will be ok.  And if everything is ok it doesn't mean we will get to keep them in the end.  You were a perfect and easy pregnancy but we still lost you at 41 weeks.  With the pregnancy it is like both of us have built a little barrier to try and protect ourselves.

With you we were guessing your gender and discussing names from six weeks.  We haven't had this discussion once yet and this baby will be twenty weeks on Wednesday.  Does this make us bad parents?  I hope not.  I hope it just makes us cautious parents.  I know when this baby arrives we will love him/her as much as we love you.  If anything were to happen to this baby we would be just as heartbroken as we were with you.  I think that is where the fear comes in.  We are afraid of losing this baby and the little baby conversions we used to have just hold a different significance now.  Even when we do talk about this baby you always come up in conversation.  You are never far from our minds and always impacting our emotions and the way we act.

Hopefully we are told your little brother or sister is healthy in ten days and it will lessen the worrying if only for a moment.  We could use a few moments to be worry free...even if its just a short reprieve.

On our way to the hospital we have to walk through a tunnel that echoes.  Your father always used to make noises in the tunnel on the way to the hospital.  He doesn't do that since we were told that you didn't have a heartbeat.  It's like this grief of losing you and the fear of anything happening to this baby have taken away the little things he used to do to show his excitement.  Maybe one day it will come back or maybe a little part of him died with you.  I know part of me died the day you did. 

We love you and miss you baby boy.