Sitting at a concert, only two minutes in and the tears have already begun to flow. I know this song. I’ve sung it with the kids in the car. They don’t really understand it, but it is a bounce around in your seatbelt while trying to sing along song and they like it. It isn’t normally the kind of song that would bring tears to your eyes.

Except I know what comes next.

” . . . I’ve been given more than Regis ever gave away . . . “

And I know that the man about to sing those words also lost a child. And I needed to hear those words. And I needed to hear them from someone who understood.

Since that night, I have talked to so many women who have lost a child. Some encourage me to keep breathing, keep walking, keep searching out the joy. Others look at me with a hint of panic in their eyes and tell me it never gets any better. I’ve talked to women who have asked for help listing reasons to stay in this world because they couldn’t come up with any of their own.

And only yesterday I found myself on the phone with police in a different state giving sketchy details about a woman I’ve never met because she had a date and a plan and I didn’t know what else to do.

And sometimes it scares me because I understand. I can see how this ache in my soul could grow and settle into a weariness of life.

But I don’t want it to. I fight against it. Even in my darkest hours when all the world seems to be crashing in, I have held on to the hope that there is another side. That the threads of my life that came unraveled that night can be gathered together again and woven into something new.

I needed to hear someone who had lost a child years before get up on stage and sing about how much they had been given.

Because I have been given more — so much more — than anything anyone could ever take away. I have been given a hope and a future.

I have been given His son. And with that, in time, my own.

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And the song, for those of you who just need to remember the rest of the words now.

Children finally to bed.

Orders to fill.

Emails to answer.

Dishes to wash.

Laundry to fold.

And still I sit and linger over my baby sleeping in my arms. I stroke his cheek, tickle his toes, hold his hand and kiss his forehead.

He turns one today.

He turns one and I don’t know quite what to feel.

A year ago, there was so much joy welcoming a new member to our family. And I still remember Tiggy walking into the hospital room to meet his baby brother for the first time. He was more interested in the snacks.

A year ago, there was so much fear as hour after hour passed and Micah was struggling to breathe. Late in the evening, he was finally moved to the NICU, to an incubator and poked full of lines and monitors and rather than the gurgly sound of struggled breathing, I sat up listening to beep after beep after beep. And I needed help to navigate all the wires just to hold him.

But now I hold him in my arms and he rests so peacefully. His breathing is slow and rhythmic. He is one year old today, and I hold his sleeping body and just watch him. Study him. Memorize him.

I watch him sleep like I did all my other children except him. For ten and a half months, I’ve laid him down to sleep and turned away. I couldn’t bear to look upon his features relaxed in sleep.

Because that night, ten and a half months ago, I saw another son lying on his death bed. Held him in my arms. Studied his features looking for him in the shadow of death. But with the life gone from his body, he no longer looked like himself. He could have been another child.

He could have been Micah. For when Micah’s features relaxed in sleep, he looked identical to his brother in death.

And I couldn’t bear to look.

But at one, his features have begun to change. And I can again watch him sleep.

So I sit, holding my infant son, trying to make up for almost a year of looking away and just watch him sleep.

Quite a few people noted an interest in starting Kumihimo after my post. I am getting ready to put in an order to replenish my supplies and can actually get the foam disk fairly competitively.

If you would be interested in ordering the disk from me for $5.00 (plus $2.oo shipping), let me know and I’ll order extra. I’ll gladly include some instructions to get you started (emailed pdf).

I can also sell Necklaces Braided on the Kumihimo Disk, by Karen DeSousa, for $15 (I’ll have to check on shipping). This is the book I’m using and I really enjoyed it. The instructions are clear with plenty of inspiration to get you excited about finishing off all these braids you will make. Your book will be new, however. I’m not selling mine.

And her second book, More Necklaces Braided on the Kumihimo Disk for $15.

And even ‘Kumi’ Braidingfor $7.50.

I can’t get the tama competitively enough to ask you to buy through me, but I can tell you where I got mine. If you are only making bracelets, however, they really aren’t necessary. On the Kumihimo disk, their only real function is to keep the cord from tangling. In my personal opinion, winding the tama isn’t worth it for a bracelet. You can also make your own. Even those little cardboard spools you get to hold embroidery floss would work.

And of course all profits will go to Tiggy’s House, which is the best part.

Let me know in comments or through my contact form if you are interested.  I would like to put my order in by Monday. (I don’t require payment before I order, just before I ship.)

Thanks! And please feel free to let anyone else know who you think might be interested.

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This post contains affiliate links, though mostly for reference purposes because I’d really rather you ordered those particular items through me. However, should you order anything through those links, I receive a small percentage, all of which is donated to Tiggy’s House.

Who can resist their soft, wriggly cuteness?

Their soft mews, pleading for their mother’s attention?

The first puppy was born just before Mouse woke up. She saw Faithful llicking something and thought she had been sick. The donning of glasses, however, told a different story.

“Mom! Come quick!”

And number two was born.

By then, we had a camera and the rest of the children to spend the morning with Faithfull.

They were all in love, cheering on Faithfull, fawning over each of her pups as their hearts filled with wonder.

My thoughts turned to another, one who also loved puppies.

“Puppy!” he exclaimed at the sight of his first cow.

“Puppy!” at the goats at the fair.

“Puppy!” at the horses in the field.

No amount of correction swayed his opinion, so we stopped trying and just enjoyed his love of puppies while we could.

Mattias would have loved sitting here with us, with the puppies. I allowed myself the moment of sadness, thinking of what would have been. But the laughter of my children and the rapt attention of my little one just discovering the world balanced my grief with joy.

Love holds such beautiful power.

And Faithfull had nine puppies.

And Faithfull and her puppies even have a blog of their own, written by Mouse, where she is asking for help in naming “Number Nine” who came long after we thought she was finished. Anyone interested in a puppy can watch their puppy grow up online and see the work we are putting into helping them have a good start in life.

I have a new hobby.

I’ve actually started a number of things over the past eight or nine months. I seem to have a certain need to occupy my hands. But while my general mood has leveled out, I still do not do well with things that require much concentration. Like crocheting a unicorn whose three mismatched hooves have sat in the bottom of a box for months.

Come to think of it, learning new things isn’t coming particularly easy, either. The learning goes OK, so long as it isn’t very complex, but things don’t seem to stay learned. Like this knot I learned to tie a few months ago. I watched a video, went back with some scrap hemp and paused the video a few times to tie it and then did it on my own the third time through.  It is a pretty easy knot. I’ve tied it at least 40 times since. And then suddenly I couldn’t. I went back and watched the video and it took me longer to get it right this time then it did when I first learned it.

Clearly, my brain is not working quite right. But I guess it is working well enough that I at least notice, so I guess I’m moving in the right direction.

But that is neither here nor there. Back to my new hobby.

It’s called Kumihimo. The Japanese art of braiding. I came across it when I checked out a book from the library on braiding and realized it wasn’t quite what I thought it was. The braids were beautiful and complex and required special equipment to make. Special equipment that cost over $100. So after imagining myself sitting for hours at a maru dai turning out yards of lovely braids, I retuned it.

But then I found out you could do a number of the braids on a little foam disk that didn’t cost nearly so much. So I bought a disk and a book (Necklaces Braided on the Kumihimo Disk) and got started. (All of these are made with eight cords, though there are three different braids.)

My first braid with a small bit of beading practice at the end.

I didn’t use a weight for this one so the tension was uneven. Sections of it looked nice and I was pretty happy with my first attempt. I dug through my yarn stash and found some cotton crochet thread. This time armed with a weight, I started again.

The tension was much more even. In fact, I was quite pleased with the end result, except that the thread was so small you could hardly see the braid. So I got out some more hemp and tried again.

With a taste of success, I got out some variegated yarn and tried a longer cord. The effect was created by finding where the variegation repeated and cutting equal lengths. I turned half the cords over so the patterns would meet in the middle, but I didn’t cut the yarn quite long enough for the pattern to finish repeating.

Then I tried a hollow braid.  I liked the result enough to finish it into a bracelet.

And then cotton cord with some organza ribbon. Another bracelet.

And with some fun fur. A bit much, but fun.

Then I tried a different sort of braid that is flat on the back and rounded on top.

After I got that down, I tried it again with my cotton yarn accented with ribbon. Another bracelet.

And then I tried it with leather cord. This one is just waiting on a lobster claw to be finished off. I may even list this one in my Etsy shop.

Now I’m saving for that maru dai. Because it is a lot easier to part with that kind of money after you have fallen in love with a hobby rather than before. And who knows. If I get really good at making these bracelets, maybe it will even eventually pay for itself.

And if not, well, I hope everyone I know loves wearing their kumihimo bracelets they’re sure to be getting for Christmas.

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This post contains an affiliate link. Should you happen to purchase anything through that link, I get a small percentage of the sale as a referral bonus. All money I earn from such purchases is donated to Tiggy’s House to help the orphans of Nepal in memory of my son.

So, Mouse’s English Shepherd is pregnant.

Oops.

We hadn’t even really decided whether or not we wanted to breed her, but a split heat cycle took us by surprise and we found out she was in heat when I turned around and she and Luke were tied.

Oops.

Mouse of course wanted to breed her dog. What kid doesn’t? I was open to thinking about it, but not much more. Mostly because English Shepherds are excellent farm dogs and they are a little hard to get hold of out here. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to mess with it.

Being a homeschool mom, I turned over the research to my daughter. She did a thorough job, hoping to convince us with her stack of knowledge. Strangely, the one thing that made me start seriously thinking about allowing her to be bred was when all this knowledge made Mouse unsure of whether she wanted to breed her. She was worried about all that could go wrong.

But then Faithfull went into heat and we guarded her and got through it and thought we we were clear for another six months. Two months later, well, oops. I knew about split heat cycles, but just wasn’t even watching for the signs. I’m not even sure if there were any.

And that brings us to now, taking Faithfull’s temperature daily because when it drops to below 100, labor is supposed to begin within 24 hours.

It just dropped.

And my children are bouncing off the walls.

If you are interested in following along with our unintentional adventure, I’m sure there will be posts here about it, but we are also updating my Facebook page through our puppy watch and Mouse started a puppy blog.

I’m wondering because someone at church thought I must train my children well because of something they did but I sort of set the whole thing up. But I guess I should back up a bit.

See, there’s this lady at church. I’ve always lliked her, though I never really knew her. She’s older. Well, OK, she’s elderly. But I used to sit in church and think things like, “I hope I have so much beauty and grace as she when I’m that age.” I don’t even know why. We hardly exchanged more than two words before the funeral. After the funeral, however, she told me she had lost a son many years ago.

So now the connection is rather strong. It’s like this sisterhood of grief I’d do almost anything to not know anything about, but the people in it are so breathtakingly amazing to get to know. And now I talk to her whenever she makes it to church.

But on Sunday she seemed rather lonely.

She complained of feeling like a stranger because it had been so long since she had been to church.

I thought about being dependent on others to get to church. Of living with Parkinson’s. Of needing help to walk. Of losing a child so many years ago. And of loneliness setting it.

I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to say something. I wanted to make her feel better. But everything that came to mind seemed so dismissive of her hurting. So I gave her a hug, told her I always missed her when she wasn’t there and was glad the other lady with us seemed to have more of an idea of what to say.

And then I went to collect my children. As we entered the sanctuary, I leaned over and whispered in their ear.

“Hey, you guys, Mrs. H. is feeling kind of lonely. I think it would mean a lot to her if you stopped and said hi.”

And they all did.

And she beamed.

She even told me twice how wonderful my children were and how I must train them well because most children don’t pay any attention to an old woman in church.

And I totally wanted to confess that I told them to do it. Except that seemed like it would take away from her joy and that didn’t seem quite right, either. So I just kept it to myself.

But I still feel like the praise was undeserved. So can you cheat at good parenting?

Once upon a time, I was starting to get rather interested in the whole local foods thing. I wanted to measure the freshness of our food based on how long it took to harvest from our garden and set on the table rather than how long it took to ship from the farm, sit on the shelf and wait in my refrigerator.

more…

It was a good weekend. My evidence of that is a funny story I have to tell. It has been a very long time since I’ve shared a funny story.

That and my daughter thinks I give way too much air time to Bear, especially in the “Funny Stories Shared on Facebook” department.

This one is about this girl (sporting a custom ordered chipped shell bracelet available from our Etsy shop):

And this place:

And a little Nebraska town of less than 25,000.

It had been a long day. We left for the Dog Expo at six in the morning, drove for three hours, showed all day and had a three hour trip back home before repeating it again the next day. And when I realized that when you figured in the cost of gas I wasn’t saving all that much by going home, I decided to check into a hotel.

But I hung up without asking where exactly the hotel I just booked a room in was.

But I also figured the lady at the Wendy’s drive thru would know. And she did. Apparently, knowing where a place is and knowing how to explain how to get there are two separate skills, however.

“Well, you go past the McDonald’s . . . um, it’s the first turn . . . well, how do I explain this. You’ll take the first turn past the McDonald’s . . . “

And she started making lots of hand signs while turning around and more showing me than telling me while asking someone else how they would explain how to get to the Quality Inn. Fortunately for us both, the cryptic information she had given me was enough. Her confidence in telling me she knew where the hotel was coupled with her confusion at telling me exactly how to get there made me suspicious I’d been to this hotel before.

“That’s OK. Did it used to be a Holiday Inn?”

“Yes!” She said with evident relief.

“Ok, thanks! I think I remember how to get there.”

And we left. And I turned left. And my daughter, ever ready to give direction, protested.

“The other way mom! The McDonald’s is the other way!”

“No. You’re right that we passed a McDonald’s but she was talking about the one up here.”

And this is where the small town girl came shining through.

“What?! This town has two McDonald’s restaurants? This place must be HUGE!”

And my steering wheel got a light shower of Coca Cola.

I should NOT have watched Grace Card.

Because other than that whole accidentally shooting his own kid thing, that’s what I fear most.

Seventeen years and the living can’t get out from under the shadow cast by the one who died.

I know it doesn’t have to be that way.

But I know it can.

And in my darkest hours, when my husband retreats and the children fight and I don’t want to deal with it anymore, it scares me.