Minneapolis Trip

On Monday, Wyatt and I took a trip to Minneapolis to meet two friends for the first time. I know your wondering right now what I'm talking about. Well, we met online on the twin to twin transfusion syndrome message board. They too had lost their twins. We have been talking online for about two years now. They were and continue to be wonderful support through our life long journey of learning to live without our babies. Within the last 8 months we have all gone on to have another healthy baby. We all helped each other through these pregnancies. There is a set of emotions, questions and reluctancy to answer questions that come from a pregnancy after a loss. The most annoying is "is this your first"...What do you say? You know what they mean and yes, it will be our first to take care of but not our first time being a parent. So, even 2 years after losing our babies, I still welcome my wonderful support system of moms.

Andrea lives in Minneapolis. She lost her twin girls in Oct 2007 at 22 weeks. Rochelle lives in Phoenix but is from Northern Wisconsin and she was coming home for the holidays. That is why we all met up. She lost her twin boys at 31 weeks in Jan 2007. I lost Waylon and Jesse in March, 2007 at 22 weeks. It was indescribeable to meet them finally! To finally be talking to them in person and sharing our thoughts and stories of our babies. Andrea showed us her pictures of the girls and the scrapbook she is making. I showed them pictures of Waylon and Jesse...most of which no one but Toby and I have seen. We love them and have no problem looking at them but most people would. They were small, discolored (from the excess/Waylon and absence/Jesse of blood), bruised from too much blood and just so tiny and delicate. I arrived at Andrea's Monday afternoon and left Wednesday morning. Unfortunately, Rochelle could only hang out with us for a few hours on Tuesday and the time just went by too fast. Before I knew it, her husband was calling to say he was coming to get her. We all share a love of Jimmy John's sandwiches which I thought was pretty funny.

Below are a few pics of our little get together. Andrea is on the left with her son Jonathon (almost 3 mos), Rochelle is in the middle with her son Devan (7 mos) and Wyatt (8 mos) and I. Andrea and I love baseball and now that we are in Illinois we are planning a baseball trip maybe sometime this summer. It would be great if we could all get together at least once a year.

In May, Toby, I and Wyatt are going to Ireland for 8 days to visit Karen. She was the first mom that I met who lost her twins. Hers were born just 10 days before our boys. I'm so excited and especially after this trip to meet her and her family. She has a newborn girl, baby Grace. I can't wait to meet them all!