August 15 2014

Yesterday was awful and lovely in it's own way. 

I slept terribly from the 14th to the 15th. My body sensing the high alert I should have felt three years ago.

I managed to have a nap in the morning. Holly came over in the afternoon. I had planned supper the day before so I pretty much checked out as much as I could yesterday, while still maintaining a home with five children in it.

We had two candles burning for our princess all day.

We planted Eva's third and final tree in the late afternoon. 

Our family on earth by Eva's trees. Mike and I are pretty obvious. Kids from left to right. Samuel, Vincent, Josephina, Nathan, Theodore. If you look closely Samuel is holding a stone. That stone has a butterfly and Eva's name sandblasted onto it. It was a gift from a special friend and I treasure it.

And here are Eva's trees. Three trees for three years in heaven. The one on the left with a cage around it and a pinwheel next to it is a flaming maple that is beautiful in the fall around her birthday (first year). The one on the right is a flowering crabapple that has beautiful pink blossoms in the spring (second year) and the middle one in the back is the one we planted this year. A weeping birch. I wanted a weeping willow but birch works better in our climate. I felt it was important to have a weeping tree.

Something else happened yesterday that really rattled me and is the reason I didn't blog last night. 

Nathan was playing outside just before supper with the other kids. We lost a key to the lawn mower and I asked the kids to search the yard. They were searching when I heard crying outside. I went to check and Nathan was completely DRENCHED from head to toe. He had fallen in a kiddy pool of water. I talked to the kids later and not one of them had seen or heard him fall in. It is a miracle that he made it out to cry. Drowning is silent and if he hadn't cried I wouldn't have even missed him for at least another five or ten minutes. 

Later we were eating supper and Mike was tickling Nathan who was laughing and laughing. I could imagine all too well how different our night would have been if Nathan hadn't cried. I am not sure to what depths of insanity I would have sunk to if I had lost another one of my precious children on another August 15th.

I don't know how he got out of that pool. I can only imagine angels lifted him out because I've seen him fall under water in the bathtub once before for a split second before I lifted him out and there is no way he could have gotten himself out of that pool, fully dressed, scared, underwater, and screaming. 

The pool has since been flipped over and we will not fill it again this summer. Ironically it is for exactly this reason that we hadn't filled the pool this year. Two days ago was the first time we filled it all summer. 

Missing our little Eva so much but glad we do not have to miss our little Nathan too.