Today was Mother's Day!
We had four sets of plans for today. The first and maybe most important part of the plan was for me to sleep in. Done. The second part of the plan was to continue cramming things into our storage unit in preparation of listing our house for sale...organizing and cleaning the house all while chasing Hope and playing Star Wars and listening to Minecraft stories and chasing Hope some more. Done, done and done. The third part of the plan was to visit with Granny at her place and have a nice, peaceful lunch which meant that Daddy was in charge of feeding, chasing and other chaos. Done!
But you know plans! They change and force us to go with the flow.
I did sleep in - but I really can't sleep in anymore. My eyes are now programmed to automatically pop open at 6:45. And, unfortunately my Rheumatoid Arthritis makes it really hard to lay in bed all morning. The longer I am still - the stiffer my joints get. This morning when I got out of bed at 9, I instantly regretted it. My fingers were three times their size and I felt like the "tin woman" until well past lunchtime. Boy, I sound like a complaining 90 year old, don't I? Let's move on to something lighter....
How about we talk about the overwhelming stress of getting 13 years of life organized and hidden and staged and cleaned and placed "just so" so we can sell our house? Actually, Ed and I have been on fire - working into the night - getting our house in order. We filled a storage unit with big things - like the huge playground we had in our living room, the toy kitchen, extra pieces of furniture that were taking up space - and little things that were just in the way. The best part is that we've been going through everything and realizing that we don't need a lot of it! Neither of us want to move things to the new house that we don't need or want. The experience has been really cathartic! We are so excited for this next chapter of our family's love story. Please say a prayer (or two!) that someone will fall in love with this house the way we did and want to move in soon! We have enjoyed many happy years here.
The most peaceful part of the day was having lunch with my Mom, my sister Bean and her husband Jim - and my triplet nieces and nephew, Shannon, Brendan and Claire.
Brian and Hope had a great time seeing everyone!
The fourth part of our plan was to honor Darcy's "birth" day. It was five years ago on this day that Darcy was delivered after 5 1/2 days in the hospital laboring.
I am sure there was a very good reason that her journey was so short and my labor to meet her was so long - and one day I will understand it all.
This evening, before dinner, the kids and I went for a walk around the block. As we walked up the driveway I noticed that Darcy's pink cherry blossom tree had lost it's blooms. Earlier in the week it had been full of pink flowers - full of life!
And today - on the anniversary of her birth into Heaven, the flowers were scattered on the Earth and the tree was left barren of blooms.
As we walked down the street away from the house, I told Brian how the cherry blossom tree symbolized Darcy's short life to me. How the tree gives us these beautiful pink flowers each May to remind us of her life. And how the flowers quickly fall - reminding us that her life was so short. But the tree remains to remind us that her soul is still alive in our hearts. She'll never leave us.
"Just like Gavin, too, right?" he asked.
"Just like Gavin, too." I replied.
I went on to tell him how excited I was that our new home is surrounded by cherry blossom trees. There's one outside the kitchen window... there's one near the driveway... and there's even one right outside our new front door.
"Do you think God planted those trees there for us?" said my wise little boy.
"I think maybe he did, Brian. And I think it's called destiny."
Happy Mother's Day.
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