The First Day of School

Yesterday was Abby’s first day of school. In our district kindergarten starts the day after everyone else so today would have been Nathaniel’s first day of kindergarten. I woke up feeling terrible with the start of a migraine. I was expecting today to be hard, but it was worse than I was expecting so I decided to make it like a Nathaniel Day. 

Felicity wanted to go to the park so we walked / biked to our neighborhood park down the street and played for a while. Then went to Culver’s for lunch and frozen custard. 

After some fresh air and frozen custard I’m feeling much better.

It's all going to be ok

Our family has had a tough year.

Last summer we decided to move. We moved into our new house in September. We put our old house on the market in October, after we moved. It now May and it has still not sold.

It has been under contract 4 times. The first buyer backed out within a few days, the second after inspection because of water issues in the crawlspace. We took it off the market for a few months and had the water issue fixed. The third time we really thought it was going to sell, but after a contract extension the buyer was not able to get financing. We are now on contract number four and are supposed to close in a little over two weeks.

Through it all we have not been stressed or worried that it will sell or that we will not be able to pay our bills. We don't like that it has taken so long and don't really like having two house payments, but we are confident that God is going to take care of us and that it is all going to be ok. We have been through so much worse with Nathaniel's death. God has been with us through that and he will be with us now with this. We just need to wait. With hope.

Help Us Feed Starving Children

For the past two years our family, as part of Nathaniel's birthday celebration, has volunteered for the organization Feed My Starving Children along with some friends and extended family members each year. We will be volunteering to pack food again this year for his 4th birthday.

This year I decided to create a fundraising page so that our friends and out of town family that can not participate physically packing food with us can participate by donating money to get the packed food to starving kids around the world.

If you would like to donate you can do so here at https://give.fmsc.org/nathanielslegacy.

October 15th

Today (October 15th) is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day. This year it was also the day of our local hospital's annual Walk to Remember. We walked and released balloons to remember Nathaniel and all the other babies who died too soon. Then tonight Dave and the girls lit a candle for the international wave of light to remember all the babies and children who have died.

A New Book

A new resource for bereaved parents has just come out in the last week. I have been wanting to write about it here for a long time, but wanted to wait until it had been officially published.

It is a collection of essays written by a group of 26 people who have lost a child, some in pregnancy, some in infancy, and some later in life.  It was written to give those that are new in their grief some hope for the future. Each essay was written to describe one aspect of life in the first year after loss.

I found out about this book when there was a call for essays to be submitted in an online group that I am a part of. The editor of the book was specifically asking for essays from fathers. I forwarded the information on to Dave. He decided to write one and out of several hundred entries, his essay was accepted to be part of the book and one of only two from the perspective of a father.

The book is now available. We are eagerly awaiting its arrival at our house, hopefully in the next couple of days.

Explaining Baby Brother

It's August which means it's back to school time again. It's a time of the year that I love and look forward to for at least the last month of the summer since that means that I will have one less kid at home all day long. It's much more peaceful and I have nap time to do whatever I want. At the same time it is something that I dread because I will have to explain Nathaniel to new people.

This year Abby is in first grade. She is in the dual language program at her school which basically means that she has two teachers and two whole classes worth of kids in her class. Last year there were at least eight dual language kindergarten classes. Any of the kids in those eight classes could be in her class this year. That's potentially a lot of new people.

Today Abby, Felicity, and I went to school to drop off supplies and meet her teachers. Since we were there early there was no one else in the room for a while and I took the opportunity to let both of her teachers know that Abby also has a brother who died. We like to let her teachers know about Nathaniel right away, if possible, because he is very much a part of our family and Abby brings him up all the time. Often when she meets other kids she immediately tells them that she has a baby brother but he died. I've witnessed this many many times at the park when Abby meets someone new. It never seems to bother the other kid at all.

Meeting new people has always been hard for me. I am terrible at small talk and one of the first things that most people ask about is how many kids you have or if you have other kids besides the one that they know about through school or other activity. I hate answering that question and never know what I am going to say. Sometimes I tell people about him and sometimes I just say that I have two girls at home.

As time passes that conversation comes up more often. In some ways it was so much easier at the beginning, right after he died. We told everyone all at once so everyone that we came in contact with fairly regularly already knew. That is not the case anymore. I think there are even people at our very small church who don't know about him at all. We have several new families that have come in the last couple of years and I'm not sure that we have ever told them.

I never know what is going to happen when I tell people about Nathaniel. Sometimes it ends the conversation and sometimes people want to know more. Sometimes I cry and sometimes I'm perfectly fine. Today I got teary when I told the first teacher, but a few minutes later was fine telling the second one. I have no idea why. I really do like talking about him. I just don't enjoy the initial conversation at all.

Nathaniel Day 28 - A Picnic and Ice Cream

With Felicity needing to take a nap and only really sleeping at home lately we have had to make the Nathaniel Day activities pretty small for the past couple of months. This month I asked Abby what she wanted to do for Nathaniel Day. She said "Go to Baby Brother's grave." I didn't want to just go there and hang out so I decided to make a picnic. Dave wasn't going to be home for dinner anyway so we could go whenever Felicity woke up from her nap.

I brought a soccer ball and a frisbee for Abby to play with and we all just hung out in the grass by his grave and enjoyed the nice, sunny day.

While we were there a bunny came over to see us several times and Felicity decided to stand up on her own for the first time.

After our picnic we had a little time before the girls needed to go to bed so we went and got some frozen yogurt for dessert. It was a pretty fun day.