Rainbows and Unicorns and gratitude

I'll start with the fact that all my girls are OK! Everyone is home and healthy and no one is in the NICU or suffering from anything other than the normal indignities associated with being a kid (stuffy nose, diaper rash, etc.). But it's been a week.

Now, when I say "all" I do mean all - Monkey and Jellybean, Bunny, HP & lil' B, E & M - all are OK. Heck, the boys are ok, too! We're all good.

But it's been one of those weeks where you step back and think, my god, I am so grateful that they are healthy. And realize how you have taken that for granted.

I post funny (or not) stories on this blog about what my girls are up to, what we're up to, and mainly I focus on the lighter side of things. I use this forum as a replacement for the emails to my family and friends that would have "you won't believe this one..." in the re: line. I originally started this blog because I was tired (or lazy, or efficient, you pick) of sending and resending the same updates over email. This was a consolidator - people could check in as they wanted, read or ignore what they wanted, and I had the fun of writing again. I do like to write. And lord only knows, my girls do provide me with some funny material!

But over this past week there have been some things that made me sad. Two people that I know, friends but not close friends, people whom I respect and admire and can tell a few funny stories about, have announced that they are pregnant and carrying baby girls diagnosed with Trisomy 18. This is a condition the doctors refer to as "incompatible with life." It doesn't get much starker than that.

Two people I don't know, but whose blogs I have read, lost their babies. And reading about it just made me cry.

And then my brother and his wife watched their newborn being whisked away from their hospital room, some 10 hours after she was born, because she stopped breathing and turned blue. 'lil B is home, safe and sound, and noisily demanding to be nursed, so they are all good. But still, holding that cell phone in my hand when my panicked brother told me she'd turned blue and they didn't know what was going on, that was terrifying. My heart broke to hear the fear in his voice.

I talked with my BFF "But Why Mommy" earlier this week and told her that I couldn't take any more sadness. That I was full up on tears, thank you. So do you know what she did? She wrote a post to make me smile. That's a really good friend. And it worked - I smiled!

So this post is about gratitude. I am grateful that my loved ones are OK. I am grateful that my friends love me enough to make me smile.

I am just...grateful.

But don't worry, we will soon return to our regularly-scheduled broadcast of insanity.