On Tuesday, April 21st, it was another one of those days of balancing joy and pain/grief. We celebrated 20 weeks of pregnancy with this newest baby Joyner. He or she is such a mover! I love that. Here is a picture I took of myself on Tuesday.
What a joy to be at 20 weeks. We still have several months to go, but we are happy for each milestone!
On the 21st, we also remembered the birth of Tiny 1 year ago. That, my friends, is not an easy memory to think upon. Such hard, hard memories. So much pain and crying over this past year. So much sadness. So much anger. I remember his birth like it was yesterday in so many ways. Then, on the flip side, it also seems like an eternity ago. We have grown a lot since that day. We’ve changed our views of God and His workings in our lives. Our kids have experienced death and learned so much. And, they have hope in heaven and seeing their siblings, alive and whole. We all yearn for that time of seeing our babies and being a whole family.
In remembrance of a day that has forever impacted us, we wrote messages on balloons to both of our babies that saw Jesus when they first opened their eyes. We each had a blue balloon for Tiny and a yellow balloon for our Teeny (that we lost last January). I sat with each child while they wrote on the balloons. Ridley’s notes were a collection of well thought out lines and squiggles. 🙂 I also wrote notes on balloons as did Stephen. We stuffed the balloons in the car and headed to one of the local parks. We released the balloons and then Stephen spoke a [rather emotion filled] prayer for our family and our babies. That was when I started to cry some, and Abriella also started crying. She had already been sad a few times earlier when we were writing on the balloons.
Here are some pictures from the release. I had thought we’d all release them at once, but the kids had their own way of doing it, which was just fine.
 
 
After the prayer, we walked over to the play equipment and let the kids play for a few minutes. Abriella was very sad, so I held her and talked to her a bit before she felt up to going to play. Stephen also talked with her quite a while at bedtime that night. We are thankful that we can validate her feelings/emotions and try to help her process them. She just wishes so much that those babies were with us. So.do.I.
Tuesday was hard with the memories, but I actually had a harder time emotionally last week. Isn’t grief so strange? I think it is. But, I try to take it as it comes. I am thankful we could do the balloon release. The kids said they think we should do it every year. We might just do it. I do not ever want to forget our babies. They are a part of our family, no doubt.
Thank you for continuing to support us in prayer. We are truly grateful!