Some good stuff and some bad stuff.

The lazy day paid off. :-)

We took our dog to play at the park. He loves to run, so we are usually there for a couple hours. I got bored and pulled my notebook for work out of the truck. I sketched this as a possible design for our memorial garden. (You can't tell by the horrible sketching, but I had a scholarship for art school at one time. I'm embarrassed to show this. haha.) I have a list of flowers I definitely want and some ideas for some others.

I was looking at the wedding idea board I started. I'm not ready to be married yet, but I thought it would be fun to play with some ideas since I get a real wedding this time when I am ready for it. I realized that most of the flowers on my list are also flowers on my list for my bouquet. It will be beyond awesome to be able to build my bouquet out of flowers cut from our garden so that my babies can be a part of our day, even without being there.

I kept drawing a birdbath in all the sketches I did. Weird because we don't really have a lot of birds around the yard. And I never cared much for birds growing up, except when they got hurt and we nursed them back to health. But when I questioned it, I instantly remembered buying this right after we lost Brake:

I saw this on Etsy and had to have it. I don't even like to wear jewelry, but I was drawn to it. It made me smile when my entire world was crumbling around me. A few days later I found this at the Remembering Our Babies Boutique:

Right before I went back to work I had a dream where I saw both of my babies. Together. The day I went back to work I kept thinking of that dream, especially when I saw those feet in the rear-view mirror. When I parked at work, I wasn't ready to go. I wasn't ready to face a shop and squadron that was used to me being the pregnant lady. I stared at those feet, thinking of that dream, and dreading the day I was about to have. When I looked back down, I saw these two little guys sitting on the fence in front of me:

One was slightly bigger than the other but otherwise identical. They sat there, staring at me for about 5 minutes. They would occasionally fidget and shuffle their wings and look at each other, but then they would always turn back to me. I thought about the dream again and both of my babies being together and had this immensely peaceful feeling come over me.

I thought about that incident when I questioned the birdbath. Maybe that's why I'm so drawn to it now. Because of these tiny little birds that gave me that moment of peace that I needed so badly. (When we were leaving, I noticed that the notebook I was writing in is also covered in hearts and birds. Weird.)


I feel a little better about this memorial garden and service thing now, since I have some sort of idea how it might work. I feel like I will be able to better prepare myself for it if I know what it's gonna look like and how it's gonna work out, even though we all know nothing ever works out like you plan it.

We killed some time at Michaels while we were getting our dog groomed. I could easily spend an entire day in that store. (As long as Bryan isn't there. He gets bored and annoyed.) I have been toying with the idea of a scrapbook for the babies. I don't have much to show for either of them. I have one ultrasound picture of Lilly. I have 2 ultrasound pictures and 3 pictures we took at the funeral home of Brake. And I have a onesie I had made for him and some books I got him. It feels weird to think of making a scrapbook without much to put in it and without having those baby milestones to document. But I want to do something with their story, to help me remember things like the foods I liked or places we went, and I guess to sorta document our growth and healing from all this. On a whim I walked down the scrapbook aisle not paying much attention because I didn't like many of them and I wasn't ready to start doing something like that. This blog is already hard enough some days. Then I spotted this:

I love quilts. And sewing. And animals. When I saw this, I had to have it, and I could not start working on it soon enough. I bought a scrapbook when I first joined the Navy so that I could put some of my adventures in it. The scrapbook and the box of paper and stickers and all that stuff is sitting in a giant box in my storage shed. It's been boxed up for almost 4 years, since I bought it. I pulled the stickers out to start working on this one as soon as we got home. I was working on two pages, one with Lilly's picture and one with Brake's picture. I ran out of letter stickers before I could finish both names, so I got mad and put it away. Hopefully I'll pull it out when I get back from my trip to TN.


I'm still nervous about going to TN. I'm excited because my family will be together for the first time in over a year. My sister and I aren't home very often, and we are almost never there at the same time. But it's such a stressful time, especially with all the things already stressing us this month, like the babies' garden, birthday flowers for Felichia's grave, the one year anniversary for Lilly.

My younger brother just turned 21. He runs with a bad crowd, and he has a horrible attitude toward everyone and everything. It's been getting worse lately. This time he threw a huge fit that my sister yelled hi as she carried her stuff in the house instead of walking over to him to say it. He's been obnoxiously drunk every day. He's been fighting with our youngest brother. Today he threatened to "knock the hell out of" him even though he's only 13. He got into a violent argument with my sister. He said we could all go to hell because no one cares about him and he would be fine with never seeing any of us again. He's been in weird moods like this before, but I guess he passed some threshold this time because my dad told him to pack up and leave.

My dad was put on antidepressants shortly after Brake died. My mom is on blood pressure medicine, and as I just found out today also on antidepressants or nerve pills or something. She's been having horrible chest pains and her arms have been going numb, so my aunt thinks my brother's antics are gonna push her to a heart attack. Today she broke down crying so bad that she just left. I don't know if she has even gone back yet.

Part of me is angry and doesn't want to go home because I have so many things on me already. I don't want to deal with stupid stuff like this. I don't want to deal with drama. I don't want to deal with mad fits and drunken rages. I don't want to go home to more emotional turmoil when I need a break from my own out here.

The other part of me wants to be home to make the load on my parents a little easier. Granted, I can't fix my brother or the hurt he's causing. But I can try to get my mom out of the house. And she feels better when she can vent to me. (I could give my brother the swift kick in the ass that he needs, but I don't think it would accomplish much.)

Please pray for my (dysfunctional) family this week. We definitely need it.