We Survived

I've had a busy couple of days what with baseball games, baseball pictures, a sinus headache from you know where, obsessing over home decor and just all those other hundreds of things that being a mother entails.

And that is my big fat excuse for putting my little blog on the back burner for a couple of days.

I still feel like such a newbie to this blogging thing but I am truly loving it and just keep discovering more and more awesome blogs.  There are some really talented, not to mention hilarious, stay home mom bloggers out there!

I just discovered another one who hosts a little thing she calls Wordful Wednesday where you just pick a photo and tell all your little heart wants to tell about it. 






I chose this one...

This was my Christmas card photo in 2004, which also marked the one year anniversary of my first husband, Darin's, death.  My mother took it for me at her house one Sunday and I can't say how many shots we went through before I was satisfied with one.  Here are just a few of the others...

I love that one of  Devin laughing his head off where the little toddler Dracenator is trying to get away...again!  

This photo was important to me and I think this was about the third different session and day that year I had tried to get a good one.  My dad had taken a few of us in Santa hats at Thanksgiving on our front porch swing but the Dracenator wouldn't stop crying and the lighting was bad and then my friend, Shirley, tried again in front of the Christmas tree another day but none of them seemed right.

But this one... 

It captured something for me. 

 I had just survived the hardest year of my life and though I was still grieving, I was beginning to breathe again, to live again, and I had prepared the most heartfelt letter I'd ever written in my life to go along with it and I'm sure I have a copy of that somewhere.  If I knew where, I'd post it here.

I was still having those big grief wave moments that come on you like a ton of bricks and knock you to your knees, sometimes accompanied by tears that seemed to go on forever, but those moments were becoming fewer and less painful and I was darn proud of myself and wanted the world to know it.   

I had made new friends, other widows with young kids, and I was (as scary as it was for me) starting to think about getting back out there and dating again, after 10 years, and this time as a single mother of two very young boys.  

Yes, it is bittersweet, this little photo. Two beautiful little boys who were thriving and growing every day, a woman who was coming into her own and strengthening her relationship with God, as she battled grief and learned how to stand on her own two feet once more and to be a single mother to those two precious little boys. 

To me, this photo says...

I Survived.  We survived.  

And it makes me oh so thankful to be where I am today.