Three Weeks

It's been 3 weeks, though it feels like much longer. Tomorrow we're going to my parent's house for Thanksgiving, though I'm not feeling the holiday spirit. Thankfully I have my other 2 boys to give me things to look forward to. I'm excited to have Dawson help set up the tree and see what Gabriel thinks of it.

We've been working on cleaning more. There's only 1 stack of boxes left in the living room. It's looking so much better! It's hard not to look around and get overwhelmed, but I'm continuing to remind myself to just do what I can and worry about the rest later. Today's goal was to make more room for Gabriel to play in the living room, and we did.

Dawson is loving school, he happily gets on the bus and is smiling when he gets home. His teacher says he's talking to other kids, which is a big improvement from when he left school in April! I'm glad he's made such improvements, despite being moved around so much.

Gabriel has learned to army crawl and is getting quite efficient at getting around the living room. He moves faster each day it seems. He can go from sitting to his belly and back to sitting again. He can pull up and stand along furniture. He even moved his legs and walked several feet when having his hands held. I didn't even know he could do that, a couple days ago he didn't, but a friend did it yesterday with him and suddenly he just took off! He's such a motivated and determined little boy!
Here's a poem I found on a bereaved mothers group:

There will always be a empty chair at the table.

There will always be a hole in a grieving mother's heart.

There will always be "why's" and "what if's" and "what could I have done different's", when in reality it is God's decision, not our own.

There will always be moments during happy times that you wish you could share that with your child.

There will always be tearful times, and once more, we will dry our tears and put on our coping face and move forward.

There will always be a shadow of sorrow that travels our life path with us.

There will always be well meaning people that tell us how to grieve and when to stop grieving.

There will always be regret for something that we feel like we didn't do enough of or well enough.

There will always be a tinge of guilt because our child died and we continued to live.

There will always be that raw spot that lives in our soul.

There will always be days that emotions run too high and hurt runs too deep.

But one sweet glorious day, we will meet our children in heaven and there we will always be.