Surviving September With Some Divine Intervention

Well, first of all, just wanted to say thank you to everyone for your comments and kind words of support during Emma's first birthday. It was interesting for me to see that for this first year anyway, the anticipation and build up to the anniversary dates was much worse than the actual days themselves. The pressure of such a simple question, "So what are you going to do?" was almost unbearable. Do you want to know what I really felt like doing or what we actually did? Anyway, after a long battle in my head, we finally came up with something and I'm happy with the way we chose to honor her memory and I think she would be too. We decided to send out a letter to family and friends in honor of what would have been her first birthday, asking them to donate what they could in Emma's memory to the Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep organization. (As mentioned in an earlier post, they are the non-profit group that was created to provide families suffering the loss of a child with the beautiful gift of professional photographs of their last moments with their child.) So far, it sounds like we've had a pretty good response with donations and I can't even begin to describe how amazing it feels to pay it forward, even in this small way, during a situation where you otherwise are completely helpless. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed.

The second part of this post is to share with you something pretty cool that happened to us on the day we decided to remember Emma as a family. It really was one of those, "you had to be there" moments, but I'll still try and share it with you as best I can. We kept it simple and decided that Josh and I could have our quiet time at the cemetery while Jackson was in school. Afterwards, we would take him to a special place and release some balloons for Emma's birthday. Jackson had wanted to send Emma some cookies in the balloons so I had him draw her a picture of them instead, then we wrote her a little note and put them inside. When Josh and I were getting ready to leave the cemetery to go pick up Jackson, we discovered that the balloon had somehow escaped our car and was nowhere to be found. Not a huge deal really, but at the time, it just wasn't a delay that we needed, especially since Jackson's special note was already inside. I looked up and happened to notice the balloon about 30 feet up, caught high in a tree and immediately started in with, "You've got to be kidding me right now", etc. etc., while Josh later told me that he was contemplating how he could climb the tree and get the balloon back. It was a warm, sunny day and out of nowhere, a huge gust of wind came up and blew the balloon back down to our level. Josh had to sprint a little, but he somehow managed to catch the balloon. Of course the only part I caught on film was the first photo shown above of Josh looking completely stunned after he retrieved the balloon. Who would have ever thought we would end up leaving the cemetery that day laughing!

The rest of the photos just show Jackson releasing the balloons (we did end up having to replace the original balloon, but at least we got our notes back!) and I also took a photo from afar of the random man from Scotland who just "coincidentally" felt the need to go the exact same spot at the exact same time and play beautiful music on his bagpipes during our balloon release. Considering what we were doing, it couldn't have turned out to be a more perfect day.