December 25-A Merry Christmas Day

Santa came!!

and so did the grandparents!!

We’ve got lotsa pictures to share from today!

seeing the evidence!

oh my! Santa’s pockets were so full of reindeer food that he dropped some on our floor. AGAIN!

The milk is gone Mommy!!

yes, that is a yardstick!

Demonstrating how this gift will be used…

Being a pirate and modeling his shark tooth necklace! Doesn’t he look like such a big boy here?!?!?!?

These were Aaron’s big Christmas wish, the Imaginext dinosaurs, which Aaron calls, “Dinosaurs in Gear.” He has been asking for these for the whole year.

oooh, cute new coat!

ARRRGGHH!!! An AWESOME pirate ship from NanaGrampy…

…which I will spend an hour putting together.

 

Can you see through the glare? My son SAW and CHOSE this gift for his Mommy all by himself…LOTR Pez dispensers!!

Somewhere between watching Aaron open gifts and sitting down to Christmas dinner, I realized I was truly having a nice day. I took nowhere NEAR the number of photos I usually take, which is a marker of how slow and reserved I was feeling. There were some lovely times of the day that I don’t have photos of at all, like when Sarah and Zack and the girls were over. I know that I didn’t feel it as deeply and joyfully as I usually do, but sometime during the day I noticed that I was actually enjoying myself. It was as if every desperate plea we made for this pain to ease was finally answered. It felt like the burden had been lifted, and while I knew that feeling was going to come and go, just knowing that it was possible was empowering, and it was an unbelievable relief. Just a little mercy and grace for us. We were given one precious day. I imagined that all the love and good wishes and words of support from people who had reached out to us had woven a net that lifted our pain from off of us and held it for us for a while. It really worked. We managed to have a good Christmas after all, to focus on Aaron, and to enjoy things as much as someone possibly could after going through what we have.

When we made it upstairs for the night, I expressed these thoughts to Chris, and wondered if he had thought about the day the same way. He said that the same thought had crossed his mind earlier in the day and he felt guilty for a moment, even thinking, “Wait, I shouldn’t be laughing! Why am I enjoying myself?”  I think this kind of thing is pretty common during grieving. It’s so so hard to reconcile all the different feelings that course through us, so quickly and unpredictably, and leaving so much raw damage. I would later experience that instant of griever’s guilt on the one month mark of when Mara died. But we snap out of it, sometimes at least, and we let ourselves feel good again. And the moments when we feel good will come more and more and we will learn how to live with this loss.

Merry Christmas.

December 2

Today we made a little trip to the hospital because of a concern about my blood pressure. Last night, probably due to my cough and sinus infection, I had some blurry/moving spots in my vision and saw some funky colors. I put myself right to bed, and this morning at school I went into the clinic to have my blood pressure taken. It wasn’t what you would call “high blood pressure” but it was elevated compared to what I have been having at my doctor appointments each month. So I rested for an hour, had it taken again, and it was even higher. When I called L & D at Ft. Belvoir they said we should just come in to get checked out, so we skedaddled over to do that. Everyone there was great, I was put on monitors, and our little lady was moving around like crazy, like she has been the whole time, and once my blood pressure was stable for about two hours we went home. The thought was that it was related to me being sick, but I was also have mild contractions that I couldn’t feel the whole time, and the doctor said that could have also caused my blood pressure to be elevated. Here I am, being calm.

December 1

I don’t have a picture for today, but now that December has ended I can say that once December started, my pregnancy comfort switch was flipped to OFF! I felt huge, I couldn’t sleep, everything hurt, you know how it is. I came home every day from school and needed to just put up my feet and rest, and to top it all off, I had a horrible cough and developed a sinus infection. Can you imagine how hard it is to keep from peeing on yourself when you are 8 months pregnant with a hacking cough? *impossible*

November 30

I think today may rate as my biggest ankle day so far. I mean really…that is horrible.

November 23

To commemorate hitting 36 weeks pregnant, a pretty important milestone, I asked my hubby to come out back in the brisk fall day and take some photos of me. I love how they turned out, and I think he did a GREAT job. We will treasure these photos.

November 20

Here’s some village set-up pictures!! Due to being in the giant stage of pregnancy, I vowed that this year I was going to do only a partial village set-up. There are two side neighborhoods to the North Pole, the North Pole Woods on the right hand side, and Elfland on the left hand side. Originally I proclaimed that I would leave one or both of those off, but then Aaron just got so into helping me that I wanted to do the whole dang thing. Also, Chris’ new set-up gave me so much more usable surface area AND made it so much more physically comfortable to access the back areas of the village without straining myself. Of course, as is typical of my weekends these days, I did too much and ended up with awful back and sciatic pain, but…what are you gonna do.

When it was time for a break, we had dinner and then made some dessert. I found these Smores crescent rools online and was dying to try them out of my obsessive love of Smores. They did NOT turn out very well, largely because I tried to stuff too much stuff into them. Alas. At least we had fun. We will need to try again.

November 10

Tonight when I got home all I wanted to do was rest and snuggle with my boy. We had some lovely time on the couch that was just perfect for me.

I scrapped it :)

October 31

It’s Halloween!!! On a MONDAY.

Look…it’s Rachel Berry and a Brave Knight!

Now Aaron REALLY wanted to pass out candy, like WAY more than he wanted to go trick-or-treating. While we were taking these pictures, about 10 kids came to our house, the first of which was a brother and sister that go to his school. He was beside himself with excitement as he saw them coming up the stairs. So we kept the trick-or-treating early and short so he could come home and pass out candy some more.

Sadly, even though we were out for less than an hour, once we got back home, NOT ONE person came to our door. Aaron was so so sad and just cried. He sat by our front door with the bowl of candy, and got more and more sad until finally he just laid down on the floor and cried. His little self broke my heart. I felt so bad for him (but took a picture of it anyway).

I also took this awesome shot of my boy…he is so handsome, just look at that face!

and a little candy silliness…yes, we had ALL of that left. Light action on a Monday I guess!

Oh man…a day of school and then trick-or-treating was just TOO much for me. I was definitely hurting the next day.