Mothership Confessional

I've wanted to say something about Mother's Day today. But I just can't put the words together very well. First and foremost, I am filled with joy  and thankfulness  that I am getting to celebrate Mother's Day for the first time. Ava baby is such a blessing to us and I am so happy we have her in our lives. We waited and tried for her for a long time. It got harder and harder as each Mother's Day passed and I was still not pregnant. I have thought a lot today about the journey we went on to get our hearts' deepest wish. That brings me to my second point: today I am also filled with sadness  and grief for those friends who are still hoping for their turn to celebrate Mother's Day as well. In fact, that's what has mostly been on my mind today. I know the pain of infertility and I don't take this day for granted at all. There are so, so many women who want nothing more than to earn those stretch marks and to become a mother themselves. I am...

I can't believe it. I just can't!! Ava is 10 months old! And she's acting like such  a big girl! We thought it would take forever of her to crawl and pull up and sidestep. And then one week, it was like an explosion of milestones! She can do it all now, and she's so fast! She doesn't like her jumper as much, mainly because she can't get around! I have to stick her in there for dinner prep some nights before Chris gets home.  She's not happy in there for very long anymore! Her favorite thing is to walk around the house with help. She seeks out our hands and grabs them and starts smiling and squealing, pulls to standing, demanding for us to help her walk! She can now pull to stand, and then stand for a bit without holding onto anything. She's getting so brave! Last week she surprised me and crawled up a few steps! It gave me a heart attack because I didn't think she could do it! She has really become an adventurous little girl...

So, awhile back, I made a post about our first raised flower bed . We were first-timers. My vision came to life, and we were pretty proud of ourselves. For the sake of keeping this blog honest and about how life really  is, I'd like to update you on said flower bed. All the plants died. I was very sad. All my little bushes died off, slowly. One by one. In my defense, I got pregnant and I cared about nothing else in the world. Gardening was just not my priority, plus we had spent $200+ on this flower bed and we were not prepared to invest any more on it while trying to stock a baby room. So it sat. All dead and lonely. I pulled the bushes out and left the bed barren. Here's what happened: we had to dig out so much of this red Tennessee clay and backfill it, and we didn't account for the settling that would happen. I didn't pack down the dirt (mainly because we were tired of buying and hauling the insane amount of bags of dirt it ...