From Grief to Hope

Sharing a note for a dearly loved couple who lost their baby through premature labor at 20 weeks old. My heart aches for every expecting mother who has to go through this. I take hope that from our tears and grief and brokenness, He forms a heart that is more tender and more ready to love and nurture again.

Dear Ate xxx,

Memories of my lost baby came rushing back when I heard the sad news about [baby's name]. I mourn and grieve and cry with you. Just looking at his precious frail body breaks my heart- and I know it's breaking yours over and over again.


And yet in our brokenness we have to find the strength to look ahead and hope again. And our hope is not in vain when our hearts are captured by God's love. We hope again for another baby for you and [her husband]. We hope again that you will find yourself in the delivery room once more and you will get to hear the cries of your precious one.


There will be days when you will ask over and over again: "Why?" And the why's may never be answered. I take comfort in knowing that I can trust in God's loving heart. He gives and takes away. We thank Him when He gives, we thank Him when he takes away.


[Baby's name] will always be a part of our hearts and we treasure his memory with you and [her husband]. As you grieve over him, I pray that you will also make room in your heart for comfort, healing and hoping again :)

We love you and our prayers are with you.

Jihan & Ryan

Blog Changes

Earlier this month, I deleted my two old blog sites and merged all of the posts here. Straightcurves Run! was meant to chronicle my running journey while Make It Two was supposed to be a joint blog with my husband. The running site hibernated once we started planning for a baby while the joint blog became a victim of other priorities. 

If you read the previous posts, expect some incoherence in the topics. I do wish to continue blogging if only to capture priceless lessons, beautiful moments and the anatomies of my daily challenges, which should be filed in my memory. At least, if the latter fails, I have this to return to.

More than a year later...

I am still up at 1am, reviewing for an exam  on Saturday in financial derivatives. My last post here was dated August 2, 2010. I was pregnant with twins then and had just resigned from work.

Fast forward to today: we now have a beautiful angel who's turning one on Feb 21,  and I'm a full-time homemaker pursuing a master's degree in MS Finance. Obviously, a lot of stories need to be told from where I left off...

I have always wanted to resume blogging again, but somehow failed to pin down a start date. Just now, while reviewing, it struck me that maybe I should start this instant. Well, it's really more of me wanting to get distracted from my review. Hehe.  This is one nasty habit I need to rid myself of- wanting to be distracted when doing something tedious but necessary. So let me cut this distraction short before I get too distracted. I hope I don't find myself wanting to be distracted when I write my next post :-)

I shall come back after my Saturday exam!

p.s. I'm bothered with our blog site title. We're now three so shall I change it to "make it three"? An argument against that would be, well, Rylah isn't contributing to this site yet, so yes, "make it two" is still appropriate. It's not obvious but this is supposed to be a joint blog site between me and hubby. He has yet to post something though. Maybe I should boot him out? Hmmm... Now I'm too distracted!!

See You in 2011!

I'm trying to recall when I had my last running race. Was it the 15k Amazing Kidney Run in UP? That was like months ago- March 7, 2010 to be exact. And since then, no more as another conflicting aim came up: project baby.

It had to take one miscarriage for me to realize that I tend to have delicate pregnancies. Unlike others, I cannot possibly do brisk walking or light running without jeopardizing my baby (babies this time as I am having twins).

And so, it is goodbye running for now. I will see you sometime in June 2011. I'm still dreaming of doing a marathon. Who knows, I might even try to push my twins along on my first try. Ok, maybe not for the whole stretch :-) Just for pictorials. Hehehe.

To my running friends, enjoy it while you can! I will have to content myself with egging my husband to run for me instead.

I will definitely be back!

Double Surprise!

Finding out that we were pregnant again three months after a miscarriage was already great news. Finding out that we were having twins this time around was just more than what we could ever have imagined or expected! God does give and take away at His own will. But He also remembers to restore.

It was July 19 when I had my first ultrasound to check for the viability of my pregnancy. All we were praying for was for the baby to have a heartbeat. How surprised we were when two heartbeats fluttered before us!

I was struggling to hold back the tears when the doctor showed those two tiny specks of life onscreen. Ryan made things "worse" when he came in and just broke down when he realized his bills and payables would be doubled (hehehe ;-p)! We ended up laughing and crying inside the ultrasound room as we hugged and said a prayer together.

How I wish I could say that it was smooth sailing after. The day before the first ultrasound, I had some light blood spotting and was rushed to the hospital. Given my pregnancy history,  my current pregnancy is deemed to be on the sensitive side. I had to take two weeks of complete bed rest. That was TWO whole weeks of not going out of the house and limited bathroom privileges. I almost got depressed until I saw the second ultrasound results. Barely two weeks after, the tiny specks quadrupled in size and their heartbeats were more than twice as fast as mine.

Ultrasound snapshot at 7 weeks, 4 days. The Tan twins now measure 1.35 cm with heartbeats of 169 and 162 bpm.

Today, my Bible reading brought me to Psalm 127:3. It says that children are an inheritance from the Lord. They are not worked for- they are simply given. Everytime I lay my hands on my womb to pray for my unborn babies, I do wrestle with God to have their lives preserved. We are still within the twelve-week danger zone. I can only do so much in eating the right food, staying away from harmful substances, taking plenty of rest, giving up certain activities and even taking on the wheelchair. But in the end, it is still the sovereignty of God that will prevail.

I choose to be still now and know that God is God, and BELIEVE  that He will give us our babies this time around.

No to Stairs

I have resolved to avoid the stairs for at least the next seven months. It will be a bit sad for me because it means I will have to miss the Sunday services in Music Museum and gatherings held at the VCF Center.

On the brighter side, that leaves me no option but to stick with VCF Greenhills' new mid-week services at the Teatrino. God's timing is really good!

Salt and Groceries

The two-week complete bed rest sentence finally ended with today's checkup with my OB-GYN. My, how elated I was when I finally got to step out of the condo!

We had some good news from the checkup and ultrasound (will talk about this in another entry), and to celebrate, my husband relented on my plea to just go anywhere except home.

We agreed to go malling on one condition- I will have to use the wheelchair. For my own good and the babies', I willingly played the role of a PWD being strolled around Rockwell.

Our chosen mall seemed to be PWD-friendly and Ryan was wheeling me around with ease until we decided to make a stop at the grocery section. He encountered his first challenge: how will he maneuver the grocery push cart while wheeling me around? I found some good use for my childish instincts and gamely suggested that he continue with pushing me around (in the literal sense!) and I in turn will push the grocery push cart.

Judging from the stares we got, we must have been quite a sight with our noisy blabber and all. It was just hilarious! Definitely one for the Kodak moments category. Too bad we didn't have a camera in hand.

Then came Salt time. Yes, I'm referring to Angelina Jolie's recent action movie hit. Had no idea on how people in wheelchairs were accommodated in the movie house but we were game to try. Judging from the long lines to the ticket booth, we thought it was unlikely we'd get any decent seating. It turned out that PWDs are allotted some good seats. There is some advantage to being pushed around in a wheelchair after all!

As expected, Angelina was just brilliant for the role and the movie was great, except that I found the ending uncompelling (but how would you end it, anyway? Still have to think this over).

The lovely date was capped off with an early dinner at Bistro Miyaki. I didn't realize how tired I was until I plopped myself in bed. Ryan must have been tired, too, from all that wheeling around and my endless firing of "honey, kindly do this please and that please" for he soon dozed off.

Thank God for wonderful dates with my amazing hubby!