Janessa's 7th Angel Birthday

Survived another angel b-day. I did pretty good this time until it hit her birth time after 9 pm then I fell apart. I still get really mixed emotions all day long. I was grateful for really nice warm weather so we could do our balloon release and chalk drawings, but, then it was hard to see all the neighbor kids out playing and it being just an ordinary happy spring day for everyone else. So in a way I was wishing it was cold, miserable and rainy yesterday too. Do these "Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" opposing feelings ever go away???????????

Feeling a little down today remembering that today was the last time I held Janessa and when I handed her to the nurse and it was the last time I saw her. Feeling overwhelmed with all the changes in my Dad's life and my sister's and I's lives since his stroke. That has brought all the ptsd feelings to the surface of the major changes Janessa's death brought to our lives. Feeling sad because now the season of angel b-days and remembrance days has begun for me--in 2 weeks it will be Rae Anne's angel b-day and in 2 months Hope's angel b-day. I'm also dreading in 365 days Janessa's 8th angel b-day because that is going to be a really, really, tough one for me to get through.

I'll feel the rain of my tears and the dark clouds of my sadness for today hoping that tomorrow the sun will come out again.

Started out the day watching the sunrise over the pinwheel 7.  It wasn't a particularly spectacular sunrise like I was hoping.  There really wasn't any color and there were clouds so when the sun did pop up it was blocked by the clouds at first.  One of these days I'm going to get that awesome sunrise on her angel b-day.  After that I ran up to the rehab center to help my Dad with his stroke therapy.  I did find peace in helping my Dad even though some of it was really hard to watch because he was struggling so much to relearn these basic skills.  When he was doing his exercise hand bike exercises and I was trying to encourage him, he kept making all these funny faces at me to get me laughing so that was fun.

After lunch we wrote love messages on balloons for Janessa and released them into the sky.  Because I've decided to only do balloon releases on Janessa's b-day I got a yellow, orange, and blue balloon for Hope, Jason, and Rae Anne and they just got their b-day balloons early.

It was awesome to watch the balloons float off into the clouds.  This year they went south west in direction.

Then we made chalk b-day cards. 

We had dinner on princess plates and lit 7 b-day candles.

We ended the day watching the movie Moana and then lit 7 luminaries out by the pinwheel 7 and flipped on the Christmas lights which haven't been taken down yet so they are now "Janessa's b-day lights!!"