This blog post is part of a series that I began for telling our story. You can read the first post here.

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My sister had a tradition with each of her pregnancies of giving the baby a nickname. This helped with the period of time when they didn’t know if it was a boy or girl, so that the baby didn’t have to be an “it” without any identity. Generally the nickname would come from a cartoon, because my sister is the queen of Disney flicks. She watched them all on repeat so many times that I’m amazed the VCR didn’t break.

Anyway, someone suggested Thumper. Maybe my sister? Maybe one of her kids? I can’t remember now. And so our little one had a temporary name. I loved it – Bambi was the first movie I saw in the theater as a kid, and I have always loved rabbits. Beatrix Potter, the Velveteen Rabbit, and a lesser-known one called The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes were my favorites growing up. So now we had not only a nickname, but a theme for the nursery.

With Jonah, it had been teddy bears. I envisioned the teddy bear’s picnic with primary colors in his nursery. At this point, we didn’t know boy or girl, so colors weren’t even a thought yet. Actually, I was still in the grips of morning sickness so my thoughts were mostly of getting from one moment to the next. Like I said before, pregnancy was always hard on my body.

My first pregnancy, I was 25 years old. This time, I was 33. I can’t imagine how someone my current age can handle it. But I also know it’s more and more the trend, waiting until later in life to start a family. I also know of a few people who had a baby later in life after having others earlier – sometimes the age difference between oldest and youngest is significant! Every family is different and special. I just cannot fathom how pregnancy would feel at my age, give how hard it was in my twenties and thirties. God bless the 40-something mamas out there. You are total rock stars in my book!

I still have a small collection of stuffed Thumpers, including a pair of gray and yellow babies like the cartoon one has in the movies. We have a whole set of toys and figurines, actually, that are tied into our children, and include special memorial boxes for each of them. The memories contained in these things and others are priceless, and even without the possessions, the memories themselves can never be taken away.

That’s the point of all of these posts. To share the memories, both sweet and difficult, with all of you, especially those of you we did not know when we walked the journey the first time.

Next post coming tomorrow.