Noah's Rainbow

May 11, 2021 To my Rainbow Baby, Henry, Today, you are three months old! I just do not understand how that is possible. It feels like you were placed in my arms as a tiny newborn and then I blinked and here we are, three months later. You are getting so big, you have such a huge personality, and you are learning and developing every single day. I just can’t believe how fast time is going already, and we’re only three months in. I know that these weeks and months will continue to fly by, so I pray God will help me cherish each moment while I’m in it. We’ve had a busy week and a half since my last letter. Two weekends ago, we made the second stop on our tour to introduce you to your extended family. This time, we drove 6 hours to Belleville, Pennsylvania, so you could meet Gram Miller’s family, the Sharps. Because the drive was much longer, we had to plan out your feeding schedule to make sure our stops were well timed. We made sure you ate right before we got on the road, and you crashe...

  October 16, 2020 To my Rainbow Baby, Today, I am 21 weeks pregnant! This has been one of the hardest weeks of my career. I have gone through the losses of students and colleagues, had opportunities to lead new programs fizzle out, and have spent the last 7 months trying to figure out how to teach in the midst of building closures and a global pandemic. Both nothing I have experienced in the last 8 years has prepared me for this week. Since summer, our school district has been trying to figure out how to start this school year in a way that provided a strong education to our students while keeping students and staff safe from the rapid spread of this disease. My school also needed to negotiate a regular working contract for this school year on top of coming to agreements on working condition plans for distance learning and hybrid models. The fluctuating numbers in Ohio caused some of these plans to start and stop suddenly because of the need to shift to virtual plans before school...

September 25, 2020 To my Rainbow Baby, Today, I am 18 weeks pregnant! It has been quite a week, and so much has happened to ignite my anxious heart. On Tuesday evening as I was falling asleep, your daddy shook me awake to tell me something did not feel right with him. He was having trouble breathing and his heart was racing. After weighing our options and taking a quick walk outside to see if the episode would pass, we got in your dad’s truck and I started driving him to the hospital. Let me tell you, I was out of sorts. I am not comfortable driving that truck, especially at night, and I was terrified that something awful was wrong with your dad. Your dad must have sensed that pretty easily, because as we rounded a corner near the fire station 10 minutes from our house, he told me to pull in. I went inside and knocked on a door that I could hear voices behind, and some firefighters peeked out looking extremely confused. In a rush, I told them what was going on with your dad outside, an...