Lucy's 100 Good Wishes...

I bought this "100 Good Wishes" quilt when we were about 9 months into trying to get pregnant. Back then it seemed like it would happen any minute, the next month was always "our" month.


As the months went by I was less and less sure. Eventually it was returned back to the box it came in, stashed in the closet of our guest room that no one ever went into. Out of sight, out of mind.

25 months after we first started hoping and wishing for a baby the quilt came back out again. It was the first thing in Lucy's room, folded in a corner of the empty room that had joyfully been dubbed "the baby's room" only days after we saw those two pink lines. Eventually that room was filled with more carefully hand-picked items-- special things lovingly chosen for our incoming little lady. The blue antique rocking chair that my mother rocked me in, the porcelain bear from my British aunties that was mine as a child, the toy chest that Rob painstakingly painted for Lucy the month before her grand entrance. It all started with a ever-so-carefully folded quilt in the corner of an empty room. One that was bought so many months before, before the crushing disappointment, before the tests, before the drugs and the specialists, when trying to get pregnant was still optimistic, still new, still easy. All of that is a hazy memory now, but the quilt, and its 100 Good Wishes for my Lucy, still reminds me that things didn't turn out exactly in the timeline that we had originally hoped, but I wouldn't change one bit of it for the world.

Now the quilt hangs proudly on her wall, and I'd like to make it all the more special for Lucy by starting a series of weekly "Letters to Lucy" based around each of the 100 good wishes on the quilt. I'll be beginning with the first wish "Virtue" next week. Stay turned!

"May you have enough happiness to make you sweet, enough trials to make you strong, enough sorrow to keep you human, enough hope to keep you happy."
-Irish Blessing