April revisited

This is the second time I'm participating in Time Warp Tuesday, hosted by Kathy at Bereaved and Blessed and this month's topic is "April".  Kathy writes:

April represents the beginning of the second quarter of each New Year, it is filled with rainy days and all things blooming. Some years Easter and Passover fall in April, bringing forth important and special events in many faith traditions. Choose a post from your archives that you wrote during the month of April. It can be about any thing or topic that speaks to you. Then write a new post on your blog about why you chose the post that you did and what has happened in your life since.

I had several posts to choose from, but ultimately selected one from two years ago, called Random Thoughts, because it really has a connection with where I am now. It was about a month before the FET with our lonely frosty and I was a bit pessimistic about it all. I wrote:

We only have one embryo frozen, how big is the chance it won't thaw properly? It's the same Grade A excellent quality as one of the embies that was transferred for IVF#2 - which didn't make it. So why should I believe its frozen brother or sister will have a better chance?

Well, turns out our little frosty did have a better chance than his two fresh siblings! He thawed properly, he nested comfortably in my uterus and stayed there until he was fully finished and ready to see the world. M. Gourmand completes our little family and makes me look at the bright side of things - and if his hands are cold I sometimes joke that it is because he was frozen for his first three months...

Sunday Child lucky charm

I remember when Kathy introduced the Time Warp Tuesday blog hop for the first time, I commented on her post saying that I would definitely participate. I just checked on her blog, that was September 2011… Well, better late than never, so here's my first Time Warp Tuesday post! This month's topic is luck.

I wrote about luck in January 2009 when I was pregnant with M. Sensible, it's a pretty dark post, talking about the lost charm of being a "Sunday Child" and my frustration about not being able to find work here in France.

What I wrote about there can on occasion still frustrate me, but I've come a lot further. I stopped moaning about my lost career and have accepted that I'm just in a different place now, where I try to juggle being a mom and doing freelance work (there is a post about that brewing in my head too). Above all, that post is only talking about my professional life. Granted, even though I was pregnant when I wrote it I didn't have kids yet, so there didn't seem to be much else as important in life as a career. I now know that I'm happiest when I've found a good balance between taking care of my kids and doing work I like. This is not at all easy, but I've come to realize that I'm a lot more relaxed when I savor what I have than when I constantly strive for things that might stay out of my reach (wow, that Positive Psychology workshop I followed last year did help!).

Coming back to the other part of that post, of whether I've found my lucky charm again… Yes I have. That pregnancy resulted in a healthy baby and a now thriving preschooler, who also has a little brother who starts sharing (read: stealing) his toys. My professional life is still a bit "stay-at-home-mom doing some projects on the side" (as hubby labeled my activity recently) but that's okay. I've also had some luck with finding lost items again, the best story is this: my iPhone fell out of my pocket on a high way rest area last summer when we were on our way back from Holland - I noticed it about 40 km later… It was a toll road so we took the next exit and the people at the toll booth contacted the people near the rest area (which was at the entrance of the toll road) while hubby kept calling my number… After about 20 minutes the toll booth person picked up - a high schooler had found it, wanted to keep it but a trucker had told him/her to hand it in (so we turned around, paid a lot of toll that day and came home very late, but at least I didn't have to buy a new phone!).