Xander Cole 10 Months

I can’t believe it’s been 10 months.   His birthday is so close it looms in the back of my mind, I wonder how it will be.  February 3rd is also coming, 2 weeks away from the day our lives changed forever.  The day the doctor told us “things didn’t look good for our baby”  The day we found out he was dying and that there was very little we could do about it. I HATE THAT STUPID DAY!!

 

Today I want to share the short story of how Xander got his name.  I wanted to share this for a couple of reasons.  1. Xander is our child and he is very real to us.  Sometimes people think because we didn’t get to be with him very long that his death isn’t as hard or as bad/sad as if one of our other children had died.  Trust me, that is not true, and that is because he feels like all of my other kids, very real.  2.  I want his brothers and sisters to know, so I wanted it to be recorded here as well as my journal so that it’s more permanent.

 

I have always wanted 7 kids, Cameron was happy to have 5.  I kept feeling that we were to have another baby, but that is absolutely a decision that is made as a couple.  So I started to bring it up once in a while to see how Cameron would take it, basically he wouldn’t talk about it at all, he would just change the subject every time I brought it up.  That went on for months.  Finally I asked him if he would at least pray about it and then let me know what he thought.  He said he would.  About a month later I brought it up again and he said that he had prayed about it and he too thought that we should have another baby.  He also knew that this baby would be a boy.  I really wanted it to be a boy, so we could have 3 boys and 3 girls, that way everyone has brothers and sisters.  Silly I know but still I did. 

Then all that other stuff with my surgery happened and I didn’t really think about the baby being a boy or a girl I just wanted them to be healthy.  We had talked about names that we liked but when you are tying to name your 6th child things get a little harder.   We had a short list of boy names and a very short list of girl names that we kind of liked but nothing was jumping out at us.  Our boy names were Carter, Porter and Xander but in no way was Xander #1 truthfully it was probably #3.   And we had no middle names picked out at all. We normally don’t even think about names till we know what we are having, but since the plan with #6 was to wait till they were born to find out we started talking about names a little earlier.    Then totally randomly one day while I was lying on my bed about 18 weeks pregnant reading my scriptures his name was given to me.  It came quietly to my mind that his name was to be Xander Cole, I was really surprised at the Cole.  We had never, ever talked about using or even brought up the name Cole ever.  But the name Cole does have significance he is named for a boy that was Cameron’s friend and lived next door to him growing up, his name is Cameron Cole.  There is more to Cameron Cole’s story and why it’s cool he’s named after him but I’m not going to go into it.

So that’s it, I’m not sure why his name was given to me like that or why it needed to be Xander Cole.  I just know that it is. 

 

Xander,

I was thinking about you today, remembering how you felt in my arms. 

Wishing I could hold you again, knowing I can’t. 

I miss you, I love you, I can’t wait to hold you again.

Mom.