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I am not able to post on any other BabyLoss website the further I get in this pregnancy. The thought of everything that could go wrong before Abby is born is just too much for me. Renting the doppler was the best choice I made in the days after Will died. Sometimes I even use it despite her kicking, just to make sure her heart is beating fast enough.

I actually have a relative who persists in asking me, 3 1/2 years on, why this all happened. What the meaning was behind Kai's death, behind Chip's. What I was meant to learn. And, 3 1/2 years on, it is all I can do to answer her calmly, to say that it doesn't work that way, when what I really want to do is smack her.

Judaism didn't do much for me after we lost either of our babies- no explanations, no healing rituals. In fact, they were considered never to have been alive in the Jewish tradition, so technically there were no deaths to mourn. I do, however, light candles and say kaddish for them at Yom Kippur and on the anniversaries of their deaths (but on the secular calendar, not the Jewish one.) I found out recently that my mother does, too, and although we have done all our grieving separately, I am touched that this is one place in which we have come together.

I'm not 100% sure what I believe about the afterlife, except that I believe there is some form of it. I feel Gabriel near me sometimes. My husband does too. For crying out loud, I've had two friends both sheepishly and nervously tell me that they thought they felt his presence, as if I would be upset or angry. Instead I was enormously pleased - it's a sort of confirmation of how I've felt from totally separate and uninterested parties (well, not invested as my DH and I are). And if Gabe is light and spirit, why couldn't he go visit?

In the early days of shock and tears, my husband reached his last straw in trying to comfort me: she loves us—she would want us to be happy. I couldn’t believe him. It sounded so strange and wrong. She was dead, and a baby. How could she want anything for her parents? But he believed it. He felt her with him.

I had very strong, religious convictions before Emma died ... I have spent three and a half years wandering around in an agnostic, sad haze wondering just what my daughter is now and where she is. I am rediscovering my faith, gradually and differently and my response to that picture is different now to how it might have been just a few months ago. I feel privilege ... privilege that in the immensity of the universe, in the huge vastness .. she was not an accident.

Emma was going to be a boy. We didn't find out at the 20 week scan but I was sure we were expecting a boy. His name was going to be George (after my grandfather) Nathaniel (Gift of God) or Joseph (My father's name). We barely talked about girl's name but we decided on Felicity, in the unlikely event we had a girl, which means "lucky" or "blessed". It was while I was in labour that Dave suggested Emma. He knew I loved Jane Austen and he liked "classic" names.

[We named our baby] Theodore - gift of god. Considering what has happened to my faith since his death this seems almost a misnomer, but I keep hoping that, in the long run, perhaps it's not. It's such a big name, I thought (and still think) for such a little guy. He made it his, somehow, but I wish I'd been able to watch him grow from our little Teddy into that big name. His middle name, Isaac, means laughter, and I chose it because I was so astounded and surprised to be pregnant, and surprised to be so happy about being pregnant, and because I wanted all kinds of laughter for him.

It was 4 years ago, and we were living in a house we were renting from my Aunt. We waited forever to set up Jade's nursery. Two of my friends made the most beautiful curtains for the room to cover the three huge windows. The curtains even had black out lining and weigh a ton. I sat in that room every day, read to her and sang songs to her as she grew in my belly. I laughed and told her all about the wonderful things that would surround her when she arrived. I told her about each person who had so thoughtfully made or bought each and every item.