a few minutes later...

shortly after I posted my last post, the hydro guy came and got my pilot light going so I finally had heat, which lifted my spirits a bit. Then a little while after that my friend came by with her little 3 month old daughter and that lifted my spirits a bit more. Now I'm back to being sad but I'm grateful for those few moments of being less sad.

Tomorrow is our Walk to Remember (Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness). I would skip it but I'm on the committee. (I started it in 2007). Its going to be hard because last year's walk was the last so-called outing I had with Bear. He couldn't walk though... he was too weak... but he was there at least. That was on Saturday. It was Thursday night that he fell down the stairs and Friday morning when he was taken to the hospital, never to return home. :(

Next weekend is Thanksgiving. I'm trying not to think about it. Last year I took pumpkin pie to the hospital for him....

A few days ago I was on my other blog. I have a thing on there that says "You might like this" and it shows links to 3 other posts for readers to read. Often it has something similar in topic to the post you just wrote, but sometimes it's just random. Anyway, that day a post featuring a menu plan back when I was doing well with menu planning came up. I then realized that it was featuring photos .... and one of the photos was of our last Thanksgiving at home together. You can see it HERE.

You know, in reading my husband's medical notes... the day he died... someone wrote in there something about how they talked to my mom and that she said I "refuse to spend any holidays with the family since her daughter died". What? That is a bullshit lie. We could not always travel for holidays due to the nature of my husband's job. One Christmas Day, he had to leave the house at 11pm to get to his job for midnight Dec. 26. So while he was technically scheduled to work on Dec. 26, he still left the house on Dec. 25th. Had we gone out of town, we would have had to leave there at like 6 pm to get home in time for him to have a quick rest and a bite to eat before he had to go to work. It is a nearly 3 hour drive to my parents and a nearly 4 hour drive to his parents.

BUT It was never because my daughter died. We had ALWAYS said that when we had our own house, we wanted to host holidays. It isn't OUR fault that our daughter died just one week after we moved into this house.

We never got to host a single holiday. NOT A SINGLE ONE.

It doesn't count that one time when my mom and my brother and I think a couple other people came too, on Christmas Eve 2 hours after we said dinner would be ready, and then staying in the morning just long enough to have coffee and away they went.

They did that last year too. Then I got to spend the whole day by myself. Less than a month after my husband died.

They thought I was refusing to go because of my daughter when I wasn't.... and now I *AM* refusing to go because of my daughter AND my husband.

I will be honest here and also say that one of the reasons we decided we wanted to have holidays here at our house (even before we moved here, it was always a plan) was because my family doesn't *really* care about holidays. Most of them don't even put up a tree. It means we sit there like a lump on logs barely speaking because no one has anything to say. My husband LOVED Christmas. It was BECAUSE OF HIM that we continued to celebrate holidays after our daughter.

I don't think I can do that anymore.

But anyway this started off as a positive post and is no longer...

I just noticed the time and I gotta get moving.