Saturday, December 22, 2012

Tori the Elf part three

 making snow angels!
 going on a sleigh ride with Santa!
 Santa day at Maggies school and Tori was wishing her luck!
 hiding in the coffee!
 just hanging out on the shelf.
 more notes!

 she brought maggie a gift this time! a dream catcher! thanks tori!


Friday, December 7, 2012

Tori the Elf - second week


More antics from Tori the Elf on the Shelf!


 Chatting it up with the Snow Fairy!
Hanging with Pebbles the Fish! 


 Dont forget to brush your teeth Maggie!!
 Where's TORI??

Just chillin in the tree!

Saturday, December 1, 2012

beauty

she just gets prettier and prettier! stop growing up already! 


Friday, November 30, 2012

Tori the Elf - first week


Tori is back! Our Elf on the Shelf that is. We love her. I actually grew rather attached to her last year and she even made a few special appearances last year for April Fools Day and Easter! 
She decided to arrive a little early this year, I guess she had so much fun last year that she wanted to be with our family for even longer! Yeah for us!




Here is how she started her visit with us. She left Maggie a note on my new computer! Maggie has been obsessed with it lately so Tori was smart and went right to where Maggie always goes first thing! Her note says, " Hi Maggie. Im back to hang out with you during the Christmas Holiday. Lets have some fun together. Tell your brothers Im watching them! Love Tori." 


Then she left a note in marshmallows! She enjoys leaving notes for Maggie, which we love 
because I think it helps us get to know her!




  Then we got this special message from Tori about the day before. See Tori didnt move the night before and we were a tad disappointed when we woke up and she was still on the fireplace. This is where she goes every morning after we find her, its her safe keeping spot, out of reach from little brothers dirty hands! Well when we work up she was still there! :( she the next day we found her hanging out near Santa with ANOTHER NOTE!

"Sorry I didnt move last night. I wasnt feeling good. But Im better now! Love Tori" 
This time she wrote it by hand!


And then this morning we found evidence of her midnight snacking on the 
homemade cookies Maggie made! Looks like she enjoyed them! 



Friday, November 23, 2012

more about mama

so i guess ill keep writing about mom. not really sure what to do with everything rattling around in my head in regards to her.

so ill just pick up where i left off. again i am documenting this for me and my family. but feel free to read along.

so my grandmother fell and broke her hip and was not able to make it up to see my mom. she had planned up come up and see her after her surgery but once she got injured that was no longer an option. the frustration began to set in with me at this point because as i looked around the room to see the people that were there to see my mom NO ONE from our side of the family was there. no one.

we have a very small family as it is, me, my mom, her 2 brothers, 2 cousins and my grandmother. my grandfather died a while ago and like most heads of the family once he was gone our family traditions slowly fell apart. we used to always go to savannah for every holiday. st pats, thanksgiving, christmas. all of them were spent at my grandparents house. so there arent many family members to go around ya know.

so grandma couldnt come up. my mom couldnt have her mom with her while she was in the hospital.


so on the 5th mom was doing ok and then on the 11th things started to go south. i had been out to see her on the 10th and had just gotten home and had spent the day with maggie. my dad called and said that her doctor had just been in and that they were going to move her to another room a step back up not ICU but right under that as far as treatment. and her doctor said that if things didnt get better in a few days she probably wouldnt make it. so i went into survival mode i guess, i freaked out a bit and panicked. my sweet neighbor took my kids to the pool, my step son went home and i just sat and cried, so scared. not ready, not ready for her to go. frustrated that her recovery wasnt going according to plan, why was she experiencing all of this swelling. WHAT HAPPENED!? the doc that did her surgery said it went fine, she did great and that all we had to do was attack the other tumors with radiation and we had probably 6 months to a year left. but that didnt happen, her brain started to swell, her epiglottis, wasnt working so anything that went into her mouth, went into her lungs.

so i sat at my house alone and just cried.

i went to bed that night not really sure what to do and then at 5 am christian woke me up and said my dad had called and i needed to get to the hospital. this was on the 12th. so i flew to the hospital all the while praying for her to please just wait for me. i was so afraid that she would die before i got there.

to be continued....


Thursday, November 22, 2012

ladybugs

so its been a while since i have blogged. havent really felt like it since mom died. its weird, life goes on but some things just havent seem to fit and to be honest i really havent felt like posting the rest of the story about when she died. i know i need to bc i dont want to forget. it was beautiful. she was with me when i took my first breath and i was with her when she took her last. full circle i guess. but anyway...

today was thanksgiving as you all know and i was not really sure how the day would play out so i just took it one hour at a time. we went to my aunt beckys house today, that was not really out of the ordinary we spend a lot of holidays at her house. but mom wasnt there. her usual spot on the couch was empty, well until i sat in it. i missed her, we all did. no one really spoke about her, i think we are all scared, maybe scared that doing so will open the water falls and the tears wont stop. or maybe i am the only one who thinks that. i dont know. i really dont know much these days. i miss her. i miss talking to her. its been over 3 months since she has been gone. 3 months since i have talked to her. its the daily talks about nothing that i miss the most.





as i was putting up our christmas decorations this week - which are actually ALL hers bc my dad gave all of hers to me - she was all i could think about. a few years ago when maggie was a baby i didnt want to put up a tree, you see i used to help decorate my moms house every year, especially the past few years as she got sicker, and i never felt like putting up my own decor bc her house used to be like the loganville version of the north pole yall. straight up cmas all over the house. a tree in every room kind of decor. so i just was never in to it at my own house. and then a few years ago she said - erin you have to put up a tree you have kids. and so i did. and i have every year since then even when i didnt feel like it bc she would give me a hard time. so this week as i was putting up all of her stuff all over our house i just kept hearing her say - you have to put up a tree, you have kids. so its beginning to look at lot like christmas here and i think she would be proud of me.



so back to today, i missed her. but i think she was with me - actually i know she was, see ladybugs were always our thing, at least after maggie was born, we always called maggie bug and then we would buy ladybugs and then when my mom and i got our matching tattoos we added a lady bug to represent our little bug.





today when i was following william around i sat down and there she was. this little lone lady bug crawling across the table. when i put my finger next to it, she crawled right up into my hand and i knew, i knew my mom was saying hi. it made me smile.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

mama

I am documenting what has happened the past month of my life so that I will always have a memory of my last few weeks with my mom. As I’ve written some tonight I’ve already had to go to Facebook and my phone to remember dates and time of things, so it’s a good thing I’m doing this. It’s mostly for me and my kids, but feel free to read along if you are curious what happened.

As most of you know, the 3 of you that read regularly, my sweet mama had been living with metastatic breast cancer for 5.5 years. I’ve posted about her often on here and in the beginning she and I both used to write at our other blog, kristascancerjourney.blogspot.com. She stopped writing about it a while ago. I never pushed her to keep writing. In a way I wish I would have, but that wasn’t her. She was a very private person, not one to put her whole life out there for others to read about. Maybe she didn’t think they cared to know. Man I sure do, I care to know. I care to know all of the things she was thinking and feeling that she never told me. I know - now that I am a mom – that she kept things from me, probably more than I will ever know.

I just found out that in the beginning when she was re-diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer – there is no stage 5 for those of you who may be new to cancer – her doctor gave her 2 to 10 years. She never would give me a timeline, no matter how many times I asked, which in hindsight, maybe I never asked that much. I guess I didn’t really want to know. I am glad that I didn’t know now that she’s gone. When it was time it just happened.

My mom went to the beach towards the end of last month. While she was at the beach she got sick. Really sick. Like throwing up all day long sick. Stay in the bed and not even sit on the patio to look at the water sick. She almost hung up on me once while we were talking because she was about to throw up.

When she got home from the beach she went to her doctor. Its funny when I think back to her telling me – Its probably an inner ear infection. Yeah ok mom. But that’s what moms do. We protect our kids. She was still protecting me even though I would turn 40 two days later!

Well it turns out she didn’t have an inner ear infection. Her cancer had spread to her brain and she had 4 nasty tumors. One of them needed to come out now.

Her tumor removal surgery was scheduled immediately – yep, you guessed it. My birthday! Wow, the timing on that one. But seriously who wants to celebrate turning 40 anyway?? So we spent all day on August the 1st waiting for her to get out of surgery. She did. The surgeon said she did great. They got the entire tumor, he didn’t even come close to her hearing nerves, which he was worried about. He got all of it. Now she just needs to recover and radiation will take care of the other three. She was in the clear again! Yeah!

I went to see her in recovery, and she looked great. That was Wednesday. I went home. I came back to see her a couple days later on Friday. She looked amazing. You wouldn’t believe she had surgery. She was having a hard time eating bc she had some swelling on her throat but over all she was good.

Maggie and I came back on Sunday the 5th.  Moms voice was really scratchy and Maggie was just unsure of everything. We visited for a while and then it was off to home it was our last week before kindergarten started for Maggie! We had a back to school bash with the neighbors on Monday, I got a call that my grandmother fell and broke her hip. Seriously?


To be continued…..

Friday, August 24, 2012

maggie - you might be crazy video

Maggie dancing to the Victorious tv show song, "You Might Be Crazy/Have I Told You Lately?"


Sunday, July 29, 2012

friends from prek

Maggies classmates waiting for their diplomas!


Maggie and her BFFB - best friend forever boy - Bryce. We LOVE us some Bryce!



Ms. Shirley and Ms. Erica
         BFFG - best friend forever girl - Emily!

William and the big kids! He almost looks like he could fit right in!

Williams last walk down the hall!

Saturday, July 21, 2012

diploma

my sweet girl accepting her diploma, so glad its only the prek version, not ready for this girl to grow up. how is it that she is already 5! 
i remember seeing other friends kids going into prek and kindergarten years ago when maggie was a little baby and couldnt even see the day she would be that old. 
now look at her! im so proud of her. even in all of the drama, tears and whining, 
i love that girl more than life!