Noah's Rainbow

  September 11, 2021 To my Rainbow Baby, Henry, Today, you are seven months old! We have settled into a groove over the last month that Mommy has been back to work, and I’m definitely getting used to being back full time. I miss you like crazy all day long, but I’m finding my rhythm at work again and enjoying being with my colleagues and students. You are having a blast with Gammaw each day, and Pup Pup is one of your favorite buddies when he’s working from home. Gammaw had a vacation to the Jersey Shore a few weeks ago, so you even had a whole week hanging out with Gram and Pops, who came in to watch you. We’re finding our new normal, and while I hope someday to be able to be a full time mom, we’re making this work for now and it’s not too bad so far. You’ve reached a ton of milestones this past month! You are really sitting up like a pro now, playing with toys, rotating to look around, and even starting to try to move out of sitting on to your belly- although you mostly just face...

  February 5, 2021 To my Rainbow Baby, Today, I am 37 week pregnant! It is officially baby month!! How crazy is that?! This pregnancy has gone warp speed. At times, it seems only yesterday, I was walking into the doctor’s office to have you transferred into my belly, and now we are 3-ish weeks away from your arrival!! I do have moments where I think back to all the shots at the beginning of this pregnancy and think, “That feels like a lifetime ago!” because this pandemic year has seemed eternal. But for the most part, this season has gone by so fast and I can’t believe that we will be meeting you soon. I oscillate back and forth between being ready for you to come on out and hoping you will stay in there a while longer. I’m definitely getting very uncomfortable and my back is sore almost all of the time. In those moments when I’m driving 20 minutes to work or a doctor’s appointment, I’m thinking, “okay, get OUT!” as my back sears no matter how I sit or move. Then I look at all the ...

  January 29, 2021 To my Rainbow Baby, Today, I am 36 weeks pregnant! Just like that, we only have 4-ish weeks to go until we meet you! I can hardly believe how fast the time has gone, and yet it also seems like a lifetime’s journey to get to this place. We are so eager for your arrival, but we still have so much to do to prepare for you. My nesting hormones are ramped up, and sometimes I feel like a whirling dervish, ramming around the house crossing things off the list. I know that, if you decided to make your appearance tomorrow, we really are prepared for the most part- we have a carseat, a place for you to sleep, clothes to put you in, and essentials like diapers and a breast pump. But I would like to have more things organized and put away, and I’m just not really sure I could ever be fully prepared for the process of bringing you into this world! So your daddy and I are going to use every moment you give us to make sure you are knowledgeable and prepared for what to expect, ...

  January 1, 2021 To my Rainbow Baby, Today, I am 32 weeks pregnant! It is the first day of 2021, the year that you will make your appearance and join this family on the outside! How have we gotten here so fast?! How are you only 2 months away from making your debut?! This story has been 3 years in the making, and while it seemed like an eternity in the moment, it has now flown by so fast. There’s still so much to do before you get here, but I am so ready for you to finally be in my arms. As most people do, I’ve been reflecting on the past year and everything that has happened in our lives. Most people were ready for 2020 to come to a close, because it mostly was a dumpster fire of a year. This pandemic has really just been one of many things about this year that has made it so awful, and it feels like the whole planet is ready for a clean slate. This has truly been a challenging year for me at work. All of the things that have been thrown at me to try and manage as we teach in the...

December 25, 2020 To my Rainbow Baby, Today, I am 31 weeks pregnant! It is also Christmas, and we have just arrived home from spending a wonderful day celebrating with your Gammaw and Pup-Pup Heilmann. We got to see your Uncle John and Aunt Denise on the computer, too. Tomorrow, we’ll head to Pennsylvania to see your Grandma and Grandpa Miller and Aunt Ashley. Those will be our only celebration this year. We’re skipping our big gatherings with Pup-Pup’s family and Grandma Miller’s family because things are still not safe for get-togethers of that size. It has seemed somewhat strange so far, not to be travelling so much and seeing all those people. I have never spent a Christmas in Ohio in all of my life. But I’m also relishing the quiet and slow-down this year, not having to feel like we’re running ourselves ragged to see everyone in a few short days. It has allowed me to pause and cherish this Christmas being pregnant with you. There’s so much to celebrate despite this yucky year, and...

December 18, 2020 To my Rainbow Baby, Today, I am 30 weeks pregnant! Oh, my sweet little babe, there’s furniture in your nursery! There are freshly washed hand-me-down clothes in the drawers of your dresser! Soon there will be paint on the walls! I cannot believe how fast time is flying in this pregnancy and that you will be here in just a few months. In so many ways, I’m beyond ready to do this mom thing. I’m ready to hold you and change your diapers and feed you and rock you to sleep at night. I’m ready to watch you grow and learn and laugh and play and dream. I have been praying for God to make me a mom for as long as I can remember, and now those prayers are so close to coming to fruition! I simply cannot wait. In other ways, though, I’m starting to feel the anxiety creep in. Your momma has a low pain tolerance, and I’m so anxious about labor and delivery. I’ve started an online course to help myself be better prepared, but I’m honestly so afraid that I won’t be able to do it. I tr...

December 4, 2020 To my Rainbow Baby, Today, I am 28 weeks pregnant! I have officially reached the third trimester! How is that possible?! It seems to be flying by- as if only yesterday, you were a tiny embryo being implanted in my belly. And now here we are, 6 and a half months later, and there are only 12 weeks to go until you will be in our arms at last! I can hardly contain my excitement and joy thinking about it. This week has been another big shift for me at work. My school returned to a 100% virtual learning model, and I am beyond pleased about it. So much about the first quarter of the school year just worked, given everything else that is going on in our world and in my life. Being pregnant in a pandemic is nerve-wrecking. I want to be safe and careful and do everything I can to protect you and myself, but I also don’t want to go overboard and completely stress myself out. Knowing that I didn’t have to teach a room full of germ-carrying teenagers put my mind at ease, and workin...

  November 27, 2020 To my Rainbow Baby, Today, I am 27 weeks pregnant! We are officially entering my favorite time of year, and already things look so different from what we usually do. Yesterday was Thanksgiving; we typically drive to Pittsburgh to have dinner with part of your Pup Pup’s family. Then I get up super early with your Grandma and shop until lunch time for all the best Black Friday deals. Then your dad and I hope in the car to go to Grandma and Grandpa Miller’s house, where we have another Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday with Grandma Miller’s family, and then we make the long trek home on Sunday just in time to go to bed for work on Monday morning. Then I spend the next day or two frantically putting up Christmas decorations so that I have the entire season to enjoy them. This year, we are still in the midst of a pandemic, and the situation is getting much worse than it was when it started. To keep everyone safe, especially you, we decided to skip all of our travels. Y...

  November 13, 2020 To my Rainbow Baby, Today, I am 25 weeks pregnant! The weeks seem to fly by right now, as I am keeping super busy with all the demands at work and preparing for your arrival!! Your grandma and I got almost everything added to the registry this week and started talking about how we can have a safe baby shower in the midst of a pandemic in the middle of January. I think we have a good plan to keep everyone- especially you- safe, and I hope we will still be able to celebrate with the people we love despite the state of our world. There’s still so much more to do, but my nesting hormones remain happy with each thing that gets checked off the list! You are still wiggling and squirming away in my belly, all throughout the day. Usually when I am still, sitting at my desk working or relaxing in the evenings, is when you start going crazy. And you still find whatever position you are in when your little knee jams into the top of my belly the most comfy, because every aft...

November 6, 2020 To my Rainbow Baby, Today, I am 24 weeks pregnant! So much has happened in the last week to prepare for your arrival!! We started boxing up stuff in our spare bedroom so we can move everything out of there to start putting together your nursery. There’s still a lot of work to be done before the furniture comes, but we got rid of lots of junk and packed up things we want to keep for when we finally have a house. We also picked out your car seat, strollers, and pack n play, and started our registry with those items! We finally found a glider that your mommy loves for the nursery- it’s the style she’s been looking for in colors that will look nice with the rest of the furniture that’s going in the nursery. And I have officially retired my tiny little Lima Bean car and traded up to a small SUV. I’ve been driving my mom car for 5 days now and I really love it- it’s the perfect upgrade for me and I hardly notice a difference, which has made the switch super easy. We still ha...

Listen to this post here Nobody likes to wait. We’ve gotten to this point in our society where we are so accustomed to everything being instantaneous that even a short wait feels excruciating. I remember being a hostess at a restaurant while I was in college; people would be irate if I told them the wait was 10 to 15 minutes! We want what we want now and if we’re told to wait, we cannot possibly fathom why we should have to. When faced with a wait, our instinct is to rebel, to resist. We look for ways to shorten the wait, to get around the process to access what we want, to take matters into our own hands so we don’t have to endure what we deem to be impossible. It’s the little kid who climbs on the kitchen counter to try to get a bowl down for cereal because mom is taking too long to do it like she promised- inevitably what we’re trying to do to circumvent our situation comes crashing down around us, shattered to pieces, and we’ve made a bigger mess of things than what we started ...