Happy Halloween and Anniversary!!

Dear Richard-

Today is the third anniversary of the best day of my life, the day we promised to love each other forever! Aren’t you lucky?!

 

I have known that what we have is special since the first night we walked across campus in the rain.

I now know that what we have is more than special, it’s unbreakable. 2012 tried to destroy us, but it didn’t. We are stronger and happier than ever.

You make me giggle with your silliness. You give me strength and courage when I struggle to find it. You help me find peace when I am certain it doesn’t exist.

We aren’t perfect, we make mistakes. More importantly, we forgive. That’s what we do.

You are my best friend and I can’t imagine walking this journey without you.

I Love You! Happy Anniversary!!

You read that right, we got married on Halloween. Here are a few shots from our big day:

 

 

Joey's Memorial Garden

Ok, so I have talked about my friends before.  I have raved about how they are the best and so on. Today, I want to share with you just how wonderful they really are.

On Joey’s due date we received this beautiful gift:

They went together and got Rik and I this beautiful granite memorial stone and forget-me-not plants to create a garden for him. They know how much I love having my gardens and they thought this would be perfect. I could not agree more. As soon as I saw it, I had the perfect place to put it.

Welcome to Joey’s Memorial Garden:

It is stunning and brings me so much peace. I love everything about it.

 When reading about the plants, I learned that they will bloom every year in the spring. This means that every year around Joey's due date, I will have blooming blue forget-me-not's to admire. How perfect is that?

This group of women is the most thoughtful, loving, caring group in the world. We have been through sorority pledging, college parties, graduations, break-ups, marriages, divorces, pregnancies and miscarriages. We have celebrated the best of best times and cried together during the worst of worst times.

This is the same group of women who presented me with a donation, in Joey’s honor, to the March of Dimes at his funeral.

I am so blessed to have each and every one of them in my life.

 I love you guys!

Birthday Part II

So yesterday was Rik's birthday and I posted a few pics of us over the years. Well today, I decided that you needed to see the preciousness of his earlier years!

One of my favorite pics from his childhood. Seriously, how precious is that?!

Haha! Please check out the duct tape around his diaper.
He apparently had a habit of taking it off, so they started taping it!

So handsome!

If you have ever been around my husband for a long period of time, you know that when he is in deep thought or nervous, he chews on his tongue. He started this habit early!

He still wishes he were Batman. See the Halloween pic from a few years ago below...

Cheese!

  Super Stud

Happy Birthday to my Husband!!!

Happy Birthday to my Husband, the most wonderful man I know!

So by now, you all know how much I love him. I won’t go on and on. But seriously, this man is my rock! He makes nights like last night, when I was sitting in the middle of my living room floor sobbing, okay. He helps me laugh through the tears!

We are celebrating his birth tonight with dinner and then again tomorrow with a party (I am sure there will be pics to follow)!

I put together a collection of photos from over the years to celebrate his birth.

Enjoy!

Halloween 2008

My favorite engagement pic

Our Best Friends' wedding!!

Oh, this man loves his cauliflower!

He is quite possibly the best air guitarist that I know.

New Year's Eve many years ago...2005 maybe?

Sorority Formal in 2005

Spring Break 2006

80's Party!

Wedding

Cake Smashing

Dreaming of Wall Street

He loves his Ghostbusters

Winter pic

Honeymoon!

I am lucky to call him my husband!

Happy Birthday Richard!!! Love you <3

Happy Valentine's Day!

I told you that I had a terrible to start to my weekend, however it ended being a good weekend. I spent all weekend hanging out with my husband. It was a weekend full of laughs and love.

We did the usual household chores and grocery shopping (I don’t think anyone can have as much fun grocery shopping as we do!), we spent time talking, we watched movies and played games. Yes, we played Wheel of Fortune, The Price is Right and Guitar Hero for hours on Saturday! 

Call us dorks, but we had so much fun, just the two of us.

I adore this man. He is so much more than my husband. He is my best friend, he is my rock. When I feel overwhelmed and crazy, he keeps me sane. He makes me laugh when I want to cry. He makes me feel safe and loved.

This Valentine's Day is different. Something changed this weekend, I changed. I realized that life is precious and short and unpredictable. We have been through so much over the past eight weeks. I will certainly never truly heal from what has happened. But feeling so sad and angry all the time is only hurting me. I don’t like the sad, miserable me.

This weekend reminded me of what it feels like to be happy. Rik reminded of what life is about. It's about love and happiness.

Joey is a blessing. In his short life he taught me so much. I am a better person because of him. I have been forced to reach to depths of my heart and soul that I didn’t know existed. I have a new appreciation for life. I am stronger than I (or anyone) ever imagined. All of this is because of him.

I am blessed in every aspect of life. I have a wonderful husband. I have wonderful family and friends. I have a good job. I have good health and a safe, warm home. I have so many things in life that other people would give anything to have.  

We have a son. He is our guardian angel that will get me through the dark times and help us celebrate the happy times.

I am a lucky, lucky woman.

Happy Valentine's Day!! 
XOXOXO

My Story

I have jumped on the blogging bandwagon, headfirst. I have never had the urge or desire to blog before. Prior to the week of December 19, 2011, I had a normal life with nothing extraordinary that I felt I needed to share with the world, or that I felt the world would be interested in hearing.

But, my world changed forever and I need people to know that. If you have ever experienced something horrible, you know that there is a period where you want everyone to know your story, but you don’t want to have to tell them. In fact, you dread telling them. You want there to be this magical way of sending out your horrific news to everyone without opening your mouth or having your family have to open theirs. You want people to know your story, understand it and for a brief second feel your pain. I say that loosely, I would never EVER want anyone to experience the kind of pain that we have, but you want people to understand that you have this inordinate amount of pain looming in your mind and body, that you cannot escape.

My husband and I found out that we were expecting our first bundle of joy in the summer of 2011. We were overjoyed, excited and terrified! We were looking forward to the future and starting our family. We had no idea what the next few months would bring.

 

Monday, December 19th was the gender ultrasound, the one where we would see our growing baby and discover if we were welcoming a baby boy or baby girl. However, it was not the joyous occasion we expected. Shortly after the tech began she told us that she needed to bring the doctor in and I knew immediately, whatever they were about to tell us what not good. We found out that the life we had been planning with this beautiful baby boy was not going to be. Words cannot describe the pain and heartache that we felt. We were devastated.

On Thursday, December 22, 2011 we walked into the hospital knowing that we were going to have to walk out without our baby boy. Our family was there almost immediately, for this I will be forever grateful. Our family is, without a doubt, the best and most loving family two people could ask for. I am so blessed to come from an amazing family and to have married into an equally amazing family.

After about 22 hours of labor, Joseph Scott was born an Angel Baby at 5:16 pm on December 23, 2011. He weighed 12.5 ounces and was 9.5 inches long.

The first time I saw my beautiful baby boy, I realized what life is about. He was absolutely perfect. He was beautiful. He was an Angel that would never suffer or feel the pain that life, all too often, brings.

Rik, Joey and I were a family in that hospital room. Those moments, I will treasure with every breath that I take for the rest of my life.

Saying Goodbye

Rik and I spent that night and the following morning with Joey. But then, the dreaded moment came. The moment when they asked if they could take him for the autopsy, the moment that I had been dreading since I first laid eyes on him, the moment that I had to say goodbye.

How was I going to find the strength to say goodbye, knowing that would be the last time I ever got to see my son? I looked at him as long as I could. I studied every feature on his tiny little face, held his tiny hands and feet and kissed his sweet face over and over.

I couldn’t do it, I wouldn’t. I repeated over and over “How can this be happening? This isn’t fair? Why don’t we get to take our baby home? What did we do wrong?”

It was Christmas Eve and we weren’t celebrating. We were mourning the loss of our son and trying to understand what had happened over the past few days. We were discharged from the hospital at 6:30 pm on Saturday, December 24. We had to walk out of the hospital without our Joey.

The days and months that followed were the worst of my life. You can never understand how devastating it is to lose a baby until you experience it.

 

I have moved mountains of grief since that day. I will never be the same person that I was before we lost Joey. I have learned that no matter how “planned” your life is, it can be turned upside down in an instant.

Through all of the pain and grief, I came back to one thing for comfort, Joey’s footprints. He had his Daddy’s flintstone toes. They were so tiny and so perfect.

 

My baby boy’s footprints are forever engraved in my heart (and now on my foot).