Day Seven and an Apology

Please forgive me for not posting yesterday. It is my intention to blog everyday about my Love Dare experience. Life just got in the way yesterday.

Actually, it is more accurate to say that death got in the way yesterday.

A very close family friend—she may as well be family as her two older brothers married my two younger sisters—received devastating news at a routine prenatal appointment Wednesday. Her baby—a boy just five weeks shy of his due date—had no heartbeat. She and her husband were shocked. They had no indication that anything at all was wrong. Little Logan had been moving normally in the morning. By her afternoon appointment, there was no heartbeat and the ultrasound showed no movement. Due to a lack of beds, she was sent home. Yesterday, her husband, parents, and in-laws gathered around her in the labor and delivery room as she gave birth to a 4 pound, 3 ounce, beautiful baby boy. I'm told that he had lots of dark hair with blonde tips on the end, and that he looked like his mother. This little family, as expected, is devastated. She will be released from the hospital today, but instead of planning out his nursery, she has to plan a funeral for her first child.

It's been hard to concentrate on much of anything other than this little family. Somehow, I did get through my Day Seven Dare, though. I haven't even looked at Day Eight yet. I hope to be able to do that when my 2-year-old is napping.

For Day Seven, I had to make two lists—one of my husband's good qualities and one of his bad. At first, I thought it was going to be harder to make the good list than the bad. To my surprise, it wasn't. I struggled to come up with negatives. As I have gone along this Dare, I have started to focus on all of the positive attributes that helped me fall in love with him in the first place. Even for this Dare, it was hard to come up with much negative to say about him. The negative list I did come up with is actually smaller than the list of positives. That is a miracle!

I have decided that I will not share those lists here. I will share the second part of the Dare. The directions say to pick a positive attribute and thank your spouse for it. That was easy. Well, sort of! It wasn't as easy to come up with just one thing to thank him for. I thanked him for working so hard for our family. And I thanked him for being so caring. This baby loss has brought to mind thoughts of our miscarriage. He called me from work yesterday to make sure I was holding up all right. I really appreciate his thoughtfulness.