birthday

april 27 was my birthday.  okay, so it was not really my birthday.  but it was my half birthday. eliot passed away on my actual birthday so this is the day we celebrate.
it seems like maybe something matt would come up with to be all loving and sweet like he is.  but the idea was all mine.  i don't think it was the the first year following losing eliot, but probably the one after that.  I can't remember. matt kept wanting to make sure that on my actual birthday, that we weren't just sad but that we celebrated me too.  as great as this was, i was frustrated by the sentiment.  celebrating a birthday on that day just wasn't gonna happen.
so we began to celebrate my half.  but then it's still sorta tricky. a friend says happy birthday on that day in the halls of preschool and i know that they know. it's not really my birthday. and even in celebrating the half, sadness tags along.
and that's the thing with loss, one day it may be all over you and another day it may subtlety trail your heels, but it's always around.
this may sound like a real downer but its not, it just is what it is.  and it's okay.

they made me cake.
our friends did.
the same ones who came to the NICU with eliot, celebrated daily birthdays with our sick infant son and held our hands at the funeral, listened to our tears, rejoiced with hazel and anders and took us to the airport to fly off to ukraine for 6 weeks.  i sat hip to hip with them on a park bench and they put candles in a chocolate cake and sang to me with other friends and children running round on a day that wasn't actually the day of my birth.
as the happy birthday song rang out, it was like it all went slow-mo for a minute.  the park, the sunshine through blue sky and white clouds, lena banging her hand on my thigh, hazel & anders faces anticipating blowing out candles, friends who live out Jesus to us over and over and over.
i don't know how i arrived here.  all this goodness everywhere.

so, yes, still the sadness.
and yes, great joy bursting forth.

a few flicks...

when anders was about 3 months old, hazel was 18 months old.  i just can't remember much from those days, i was tired and there was so much cuteness and so much crying.  spit up and diapers and monitors and cooking dinner with one on the hip and one at the ankles.
today, it's wild in new ways and i figure every year with these now 3 kiddos will bring new seasons of fun and crazy and adventure.
today, hazel is 4 1/2, anders is 3 and lena is 6.  hazel and anders fight and make up and laugh.  lena crawls and walks and gets into everything like a 6 year old toddler.  hazel wants to hug lena and lena wants to use her to pull up to walk around.  they fall down and lena laughs and hazel is angry.  anders isn't listening much because he's gotten much better at playing on his own and pretending...so much so that listening or not banging his spiderman against the glass isn't on his radar.
i love attempting to capture some moments from these wild days on camera.  some days i instagram too much and it's also why i try to keep up with this blog.  i have a terrible memory.  terrible.  so, i've had become okay with the fact that there are plenty of things i won't be able to capture and i've get to just enjoy the days and moments without any capturing.  for every moment i capture, there are about a million more that i just get to live. really live.
and i do.

here are some things lately that have been captured...

hazel & anders singing to the radio...."back togeder"


and more singing at hazel's talent show at school.  she did great and then realized people were watching her.


and more talent in our living room, sometimes you just feel it and have to run back to your room and put on a leotard. and apparently it's a room full of ballerinas because if any of us walked through there, she would let us know we were knocking over the other dancers.



and some bedtime lena cuteness


and now for the kicker...if you can push through the minute, the end is hi-larious.  let me set the scene:: saturday morning, hanging out & playing. anders is a jailkeeper and matt & hazel are in jail.
"don't worry, i can fix it!!!"

easter

this year for lent, i gave up dessert.  if you know much about me, then you know that what i really gave up was chocolate.  i'm not the type of girl that goes for an apple pie...i'm more of a candy bar, chocolate ice cream, oreo, brownie kinda girl.  

day 2 of 40 of lent was the most telling. it was that early in this thing that i discovered how much i lean into sweets on wild days with my little ones.

naptime not going well...grab an oreo. (or 3) 

lots of timeouts today... how 'bout i make some cookies.  

an index card is on the wall above where i currently sit.  it's one i've had since may of 2006, when i was pregnant with eliot and first found out he was sick.  i wrote it in cursive, using blue and green sharpies because i felt Jesus speaking it over me in the midst of so much confusion and i didn't want to forget it later.  

it says "today, I am all you need. today, I am enough".

day 2 and my eyes were opened that in this season of life, i have not thought Him quite enough.  oh, i think of Him all the time and i never one time doubt in these beautiful, wonderful, trying days of momminess, that I need Him...i can't escape my desperation for Him.  i just have slipped into thinking that i need Him and something else.  God used lent to surface this in me.

easter has been so profound for me the last few years.  mostly, Jesus moves in ways in my heart that i don't even attempt to express.  easter is one of those.  

the first easter after eliot passed away was almost 6 months after we told him goodbye.  that year all i could do was think of death overcome.  and yes, it meant heaven and eternity, but it also meant that when Jesus overcame the grave, all my darkness overcome by light and hope springing forth from the empty tomb.  my mouth still gapes open in awe of the truth of this.  oh death where is your sting.

other years, it's shocking grace.  the awfulness of not just sin in general, but my sin. face to face with the passion of His love and scum of my sin and my default just thinks i should do more good after i've failed.  make it up to God, somehow.  or that He should really punish me.  and then easter comes and i see the One who took my punishment and it blows up my works-based junk and i sit still in the ash.  unable to move or blink because i am paralyzed at how radical grace truly is.  

but this year, easter was about victory over death and it was about His payment for me and it was also about freedom.  broad places of freedom.

i really did it.  i went without dessert for 40 days.  it shouldn't have been that that hard, but it sorta was.  there were days that i had hot chocolate and wondered if i was cheating.  and i had to buy valentines candy for preschool.  and we went out to dessert with friends at my favorite crepe place.  and it wasn't easy and a discipline was cultivated in me and it was good.  

and then...

easter weekend snuck up on me.  

i had tried hard for 40 days.  

i had worked.  and it wasn't for approval.  and i fully realize that giving up dessert is not part of levitical law, but on the weekend that we celebrated the cross, the death, the resurrection i was free.  

and i didn't just go eat a twix, i got godiva.

i was free to eat and enjoy.  and it was a little thing but it pointed to a big thing that took place at the cross.  real freedom from sin and death and real freedom to eat.  to take in all the goodness of the love of God through Christ, for nourishment to soul and joy to the tastebuds.  

so i ate and it was good.  

freedom.

rascal easter baskets

he always gets this book from the library and & he was fired up about owning it.

a girl and her accessories.

books and lena are always a good mix

we let them eat candy right away, in the morning...talk about freedom...they were so excited.

candy

they can't even look at me because they are so captivated by eating candy before breakfast.

showing off the goods.

peekin through.

paulina

this is paulina

she was in the orphanage with lena and in the same room.  so we met her, we held her.  we listened to her sounds, we rubbed her cheek with the back of our hand and beheld the beauty of her smile.

and when we came home we got to share with all our our friends all of our experiences from ukraine.  things like the smells and what we ate and the beauty of every single life in that orphanage.

and God does what only He can.  

He stirs in hearts and families and stories and children.  

and our friends, the Brills, listened to Him stirring and saw in this dear one, their daughter.  

they have faithfully been in process for over a year now and they will travel in the next few weeks to meet their little one and bring her home.  

paulina will be their 4th child.  so, there are many details to iron out and there are many funds to gather. 

will you join us in praying for them and will you join their story by giving to their adoption?

the awesome folks at titus task have given them a matching grant.
go here to give and here to learn more!

grandpa & a girls trip

i whisper in her ear.
he is the friendliest man in all of florida.
she says back
how do you know, momma, how do you know he is the most friendly?

i've watched as my grandpa talks and engages others my whole life.  there is no such thing as a stranger when he is around.  there has never been a waitress he couldn't make smile.  a conversation he couldn't have with any kind of person.  he is a wealth of random information and he happens to know the fight songs of about 10 different universities by heart.
he's hilarious.  i think i was 7 and my younger brother was 4.  he came to visit and he loaded the 2 of us up in his rental car to go to vicksburg, ms.  a town 45 minutes from the one i grew up in.  vicksburg was a significant location in the civil war and you can tour antebellum homes and the national military park.  somehow we ended up at the mississippi state fair in jackson, ms.  we stayed so late, he just got a hotel room and the 3 of us stayed in what he told us was "the highest building in all of mississippi".  i remember him buying toothbrushes and doing exercises in the hotel room.
as hazel is 4 now, the same age my brother was on our mississippi adventure, i try to imagine that phone call from my grandpa to my mom.  wild.
he loves to say controversial things in a light-hearted nonchalant manner just to see folks' feathers ruffled.  if you don't know him, you think he doesn't know what he's doing.  he totally knows what he's doing.  religion, politics, any topic most people avoid in light conversation, he dives right in just to be funny.  i think he secretly keeps count of how many eyes have rolled at his statements.

he is kind. he is friendly.  and last week i introduced hazel to him.  they have met before but never spent any time together.  as he has shown his age more in the last few years, i have wanted to go see him.  i have crossed paths with him the last few summers in michigan, however most of my time had been spent chasing rascals and not getting any time with grandpa.  also, all of my cousins are also trying to spend time with him.  he is loved by his 4 children and his 14 grandchildren and now in hazel, one of his 10 great-grandchildren.

so, on a saturday morning, long before sunrise i crept into hazel's room.  i woke her up and off we went on an adventure to florida to spend time with my grandpa.

this picture was at 6am and she was ready to go.

and even though we had been through airports & been up since 5am, she was so excited to be in a hotel room & made a super quick outfit change because she was ready to hit the beach & pool.

my grandfather & grandmother had what they said were bad colds.  they really didn't feel well enough to get out the first day & didn't want us exposed to their germs, so we just hung by the pool and then got dressed & went to dinner in old naples.  this is the older downtown shopping area of naples & my grandfather owns a store there.  his grandmother began selling laces & linens door to door around cincinnati, ohio.  this eventually became a brick and mortar that my great-grandfather otto, then my grandfather owned and ran.  at one time my grandfather owned quite a few fine linen stores nation wide.  today, the only one he still is a part of is the naples store.  so i took hazel and showed her around the Gattles in old naples. 

 

our second day there was a sunday and grandpa had made reservations for brunch at his country club.  most meals were like this...pretty grown up places to eat and hazel did amazing.  she had her coloring activity to pull out if everyone was done eating, but she behaved like such a sweet little lady and was completely content doing so.  i was so proud of her.  

the dessert table at brunch was her favorite.  she had some eggs, but mainly waffles with whipped cream for her brunch so she essentially had 2 desserts & was juuust fine with that:)

even though she did so wonderful, we had been at brunch with my aunt, my mom & my grandfather for about 2 hours & she was antsy...so we walked around some of the golf course & a sweet couple offered to take our picture.

my grandpa, my aunt, who i dearly love, & my wonderful mom leaving the country club brunch & hazel sporting her new sun hat.

while grandpa was resting or really just between meals we hung out at the pool and beach by the hotel. and my sweet hazel, who for the last 2 summers has despised getting her face wet (diva), decided to go on under and swim.  

this is her victory dance.  she was so pumped about it and if you ask her about her special trip with mom she says nothing of how much we bonded or how wonderful it was to spend time with grandpa, she only says "i learned to swim with my face underwater!!"

searching for seashells

she loved making sand angels.

4 generations.

my dad had been turkey hunting with friends the first few days & joined us for the last day.  we swam with him then all went shopping before our last night with grandpa.  dad and hazel left for a few minutes while mom & i shopped and when they returned only moments later, hazel donned a new tutu and a chocolate milk mustache.  my kids have the best grandparents...and so do i!

state of the mooneys

hazel
she started to read last week. she's been sounding letters for a while & just hadn't been able to marry the sounds into one word. and it clicked. d-o-t, dot. d-i-d, did. r-u-n, run. dot did run.
"i did it, mom!!" she shouts intermixed with giggles.
i told her i was proud.
"i'm proud of me too!" she says. and right there in that twin bed on a tuesday night i prayed she would always be so confident. i want all her security & steadfastness & worth to be wrapped up in Jesus.
so it's a new phase & although she has been bent to words & story & creativity for a long time, we've entered a whole new world.
i say to matt (in a way I think is sly):: "wanna let them watch a m-o-v-i-e after dinner?
hazel:: m, mmmmm. o, oooooo, v, vvveeeee...what's a mov, what about us and a mov?

she still loves gymnastics.  she still dresses herself everyday & i attempt to chronicle it here, but i forget a lot lately because leaving the phone on the counter always leads to more living. 
her creativity is usually dumbfounding to me. she is constantly re-arranging pillows, blankets, toys, to make elaborate scenes to elaborate stories. she is a detail girl. details in her stories & imagination (the lamp isn't orange, it's red and it's this tall) & details in her crafts/art & details of books we read (forget about skipping a sentence here or there to go ahead and finish up because it's bedtime, she catches it every single time) or song lyrics that i get wrong (this is often). details.


anders
he's such a lovable little wild man. lone little boy in a house of girls & the youngest, too. he just wants to knock stuff over & bang his baseball bat on the floor, run fast & kick a ball. and in all that rough & tumble is such a heart of compassion, too. if anyone is upset in any way, he's on it. he recognizes it, empathizes, wants to know what happened & how he can help.

he continues to love music. but he's not the type of guy that says "hey, i love music" he just becomes really into certain songs & really dislikes other songs. his head always bobs to the beat. he gets very proud of himself for recognizing the song playing or knowing the words to sing along. and he seems to be able to carry a tune. his current favorite is the song cousins by vampire weekend but he prefers the mumford cover. i have been know to say more than once "anders, if you do that one more time, you won't hear cousins for 2 days!)he loves songs with a banjo & he aways recognizes the banjo in new songs.
he's animated. he loves to make up words. he's telling a lot more stories these days. recounting daily events or making up his own & either way, he is so expressive. saying something like "the chair is over there" is accompanied with waving hand gestures, raised eyebrows, pauses and inflections for emphasis. so. animated.



lena
she has good days and bad days, just like all of us but usually by age 6, a child has learned coping mechanisms for some of the ups & downs of day-to-day life they experience. lena hasn't learned these yet. we're trying to teach her, slowly, & not certain the best ways. she's doing so well & she is the most amazing, sweet girl. she struggles, though, & we are constantly trying to discern what is a kid being a kid pitching a fit & what are the deeper emotional effects of neglect, so long in a sad place. both exist & are displayed but discerning isn't easy. the last year has consisted of her learning & developing at a remarkable pace. it's hard to emotionally catch up with that. for example:: in teaching communication, as she is learning to sign, if she signs for something we give it to her right away to reinforce her clear communication. well now, she knows to say things that she can't always have. she signs "up" & "walk" when I'm not done putting her shoes on & she gets mad that she can't have her way. and the first time learning you can't have your own way is so hard. and still for me, it's hard to understand when I don't get my own way.
she is going to kindergarten in the fall. we're working out all those ins & outs. lots of meetings, decisions, things to think through & ways to advocate for our wonderful daughter.
her favorite time of the week is pool physical therapy. she is a fish!

she had her first real haircut a few weeks ago. we're never quite sure if she'll love or hate new situations. she LOVED the salon. the lights, the hair dryer sounds, the water on her head, our friend Bek being so kind & gentle.

matt
he has so much to balance and does it really well.

a dad who is present and involved in all daily ins & outs of this house & simultaneously never lacking diligence in his job. he is great at what he does. he always has been, but i feel like bringing lena home has driven home so many of the convictions & passions of our hearts as well as what 99 balloons does. he is an idea guy in every area of life but at work he's creatively dreaming & coming up with ways to draw others into to story of disability. sometimes these ideas come into full fruition. have you heard of passport?  join us in praying for & advocating for children with disabilities globally.

i love doing this little update.  i'm reminded how sweet life is.  so much grace.  undeserved love and blessing.  i know it in the deepest places, but the craziness can blur it.  i always know it, but to sit and write it out, to remember... it  pulses through the veins all the more.
i signed up anders & hazel both for preschool next year at the school where hazel currently attends.
2 days a week. lena will be going to school every day. this means i'll have 8 hours a week alone in the fall. this is unimaginable right now. it also makes me feel old & strange.  i will be quite the jetsetter in the next month.  i'll take hazel with me to visit my grandfather for a few days next week. then in april, lena & i will head to a psychology appointment near washington dc. while traveling without matt is not ideal, i'll welcome a change of scenery with welcome arms and probably fly the friendly skies while listening to this...because it's just. so. good.