The Secret Garden Meeting August

If you created a bedroom for your baby tell us what it was like.
When we first bought our house (a few years before getting pregnant) there was a little room with a lot of sunlight that from the jump we referred to as "the baby's room." There was something really endearing about that room, it was covered in the most godawful floral wallpaper, but we loved its brightness and green rug and it seemed the perfect place (with a little paint of course) to set up for our child. We removed the wallpaper and painted the room a buttercup color, decorating it with a bumble bee theme. We had picked that theme because we decided not to know the sex of our baby (I was sure it was a boy) and thought it could go either way, adding some butterflies to the motif if it was a girl. The furniture we bought was a beautiful mahogany set and I loved those last weeks of pregnancy, sitting in there after carefully washing all of the baby's tiny clothes, and folding and hanging them in that little room.

Did you have it ready for them before they were born?
We put the finishing touches on Peyton's bumble bee room a few days before my due date. Actually, Dru put the finishing touches, I watched from the comfort of my rocking chair because it was end of August and I was huge! It was so sweet to see him hanging the shelves, and artwork, and unpacking all of the diapers and baby care items. Even without her home, that room started smelling like a little baby.

If so how did you cope coming home to it without your baby?
When Peyton was alive, we would run into and out of the nursery to get changes of clothes for her to bring back to the hospital. When she died, we closed the door, and with the exception of a few trips into there to cry, the door has remained closed. It was a perfect nursery. It signified the hope that we had, and the happy changes we anticipated. That little room breaks my heart.

Did you pack it all away?
Peyton's room has never been packed away. There are piles of wrapped presents addressed to her, still sitting unopened, that came after her birth, and bags of things from the hospital including her dirty clothes, that sit untouched. This has been a dilemma for me since day one. Peyton's clothes are essentially toxic because they have chemo on them, so they need to be washed, but doing so will wash away the last remaining minty sweet smell of my child, and I have never been able to bring myself to do it. The truth of the matter is that in the last year of going in circles on this issue, the smell has probably been lost. I hate myself for not having done something to preserve it, like put them in ziploc bags at the time.

What is your baby's room now?
A graveyard of memories and hopes that we had for our little girl. The whole house has a bit of this to be honest, the living room has the posters of photos of Peyton that we displayed at the church when she died, and the dining room still has the hundreds of condolensce cards and the funeral book from her service. Nothing feels right. Putting them away feels wrong. Keeping them out feels wrong. I hate that.

If you are trying to conceive again, or are pregnant again how do you feel about setting up another room before your baby is born?
If we get pregnant again I do not want to use that nursery as the baby's room. That is Peyton's room. I have thought about this alot, and think that I will not set anything up until the baby has been brought home healthy. Actually I will probably not set anything up until that baby has been home for a while. That little yellow bumble bee room is Peyton's room. That will always be her room. I think if we had another child I would put them into the office, and make the nursery my space to write, because I usually write about her and that is the room where I feel her presence the strongest. Seems silly, I know, to feel someone's presence in a room that they never came home to, but I just do.