Happy Birthday, Joseph

We are so thankful that God gave us four years to nurture this precious boy, and that all of his days were written in His book before one of them came to be. We are sad we don't get to hold him and celebrate with him on his birthday but we know his day will be full of joy and gladness as he dances before the Father's throne.

Looking back over the last two years it is hard to imagine getting through them without the unbelievable support, love and prayers of our family and friends. We want to thank all of you who have loved us, prayed for us, and basically upheld us as we walked through an unbearably difficult time. It is hard to express the gratitude we have for all of you who have cared for us so deeply. Thank you.


In memory of Joseph's life I have put together a slideshow, along with some original songs by Allen. Over this last year a huge part of Allen's healing has been writing and recording these songs with his friend, John. I know I'm not biased but they are some of the most heartbreaking yet beautiful songs you will ever hear. These two are the only ones ready right now, but we hope to share more of them soon. And please forgive the length of this slideshow. It was just too hard to make it any shorter.

Make an on-line slideshow at www.OneTrueMedia.com

John 14:1-3
Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.


Philippians 3:20-21
But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.


Revelation 21
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

A Letter to Joseph

Dear Joseph,

I received a birthday invitation to your little buddy's 5th birthday the other day. It was then that it hit me: we are a month away from your 5th birthday. And also about a month from the day we said goodbye to you. The time goes by but the heartache remains the same.

Sweet Joseph, I miss you every day. Every day I ache to see you, touch your sweet face, hear your loud, boisterous voice and laugh. No-one can ever replace the special, beautiful little boy you were to us. When you were little I used to marvel at the depth I would see in your eyes. It seemed they were older than your tender age. You seemed to understand, get things, before you should have. And you proved it with your advanced humor. You could make jokes that adults found funny. But you also proved it with your kind heart and eagerness to love and live life fully.

I loved your mischievous spirit. You always laughed the hardest and had the best gleam in your eye when you thought you or someone else was getting into mischief. You would flap your arms up and down and squeal with delight when you were younger. Then as you got older you would smile excitedly and shrug your shoulders and share the mischief with your partner in crime. You would say things like "Let's not tell Daddy we had another brownie!" or "Let's not tell Mommy I got to stay up late." It was always so fun to share a mischievous secret.

You, with your child-like passion and love for life, grew me up as a person and as a mother. You taught me to get over my selfishness, my need for order, my need for control. I realize now that the most important thing is to appreciate and love fully the ones you treasure. Having a house that's in order will not go in the photo albums. I used to get so stressed about how messy our house got, but now I wish for the mess...the cars and trains all over the place, evidence of a happy child playing.

Anyway, dear Joseph, how I wish we could have a party for you to enjoy. I would love to see you playing with your friends, tearing into presents, and gobbling up your cake. But I know you are celebrating in heaven and your joy and life are complete. We will treasure the days and years we had with you and I will be forever thankful for the lessons I learned from my sweet boy.

Joe P's Rally Run Website

Joseph's 5K now has a website! You can register to run or just donate to the cause right there on the website. We are hoping to raise $25,000 to fund more research for childhood cancer. I think we can do it! This is the website:

www.joeprallyrun.com

Thank you so much to Matt P. and Rally foundation for working so hard to get this up and running. It will be in Nashville on October 31st. It is not intentionally on Halloween--that is just the date that worked for Centennial Park.

I'm sorry I have been so long in updating! We have settled back into Atlanta and are enjoying our new home. I had a lot of fear/anxiety about coming back and being away from family and Allen starting back into a crazy schedule but so far God has made the transition relatively easy for us. We have a great community of friends here so Holly and I have been enjoying reconnecting with friends and their kids and she and I have been exploring our new area of town, finding the library and pools and such. We just joined our neighborhood pool (which we didn't even know about when we moved in!), so I can see that being a great source of entertainment for the rest of the summer. We also had a nice couple of weeks before Allen started back at work. For Father's Day he was lucky enough to get princess Yahtzee, a game he has been begging for for months :). Holly likes to play this game approximately 5.3 million times a day. Isn't this guy a trooper? He even participates in tea parties.

Allen had a couple of weeks of orientation but officially started back at Emory on Wednesday. He had completed 6 months of his intern year, so they gave him credit for that. This was the hospital where we took Joseph initially so there have been moments that have been very emotional for him. I cannot imagine even stepping foot inside that hospital without just breaking down, so I am so proud of him for entering back into this despite all the obstacles. It is not humanly possible to get through this, as I know he will be confronted with children that remind him of Joseph or have similar illnesses, but (as trite as this sounds) with Christ all things are possible. And somehow in our very weakest state, He is glorified most.

The baby is growing steadily and I'm wondering (again) if my belly could possibly grow any more. I know it can but when I look at it I just don't see how it's possible. I have about 2 more months until my due date, but who knows when this baby will make her appearance? Joseph was 10 days late and Holly was 5 days late, but I'm really hoping this one won't wait that long! She is moving around a ton, and often I will think something has hit my belly but it's just her kicking me, letting me know she liked her lunch. :) Here is an updated picture:


I am so thankful for this new little life inside me and hope it will help in this continual healing process. Having Holly to care for and snuggle with and entertain has been vital for me this last year. I just cannot imagine losing a child and then just having an empty house--no-one to wake me up in the morning or need playdates or activities, etc. . I don't even want to imagine what state I would be in if that were the case.

I had a doctor's appointment today and everything looked great. The doctor even let me have another ultrasound--just because. She was measuring great and she estimated the baby weighed about 3.5 pounds. It is amazing to me that she will most likely gain another 5 or so pounds in the next few weeks.

I hope you all are enjoying the summer and getting to enjoy pools and beaches and cookouts and all that fun summer stuff. Hope to see you October 31st!

Heaven

I've never experienced life to be perfect, nor have I expected it to be so. I am usually not surprised if things go wrong. I don't feel offended. It's just the order of the universe. I do believe God is good and is in control, but somehow this world has gone very wrong. The fact that there is genocide in Africa, a booming sex trade in Europe, and millions of orphans worldwide testifies to this fact. Clearly, I am not the only person who has to deal with the effects of sin and death. So I usually feel like I can deal with my small share of difficulties.

However, losing Joseph has changed me in so many ways I almost feel like I've emerged from this a new person. I really and truly don't expect that everyone I'm close to will be alive tomorrow. Death has come so close to home that it seems like a very real possibility that anyone I love could be taken from me at any time. I look at newscasters or sportscasters and see their smiling faces and wonder, "Do you know how short life is? You are reporting on someone dying as if it couldn't happen to you or won't happen to us and yet your life could be taken from you this next minute." I just feel like world is carrying on in some kind of charade, pretending like we live forever and death is this horrible end that only comes to the very unfortunate or very old. But we all die. Every single one of us. No exceptions (unless God returns before we die, of course). Okay so that's the one exception. :)

But we don't live like we know we are going to die. We go about life, collecting toys and things and money, and chase after bigger houses, nicer cars, better jobs, as if all that will guarantee us some kind of permanence. How did we buy into this?

We were invited over to a couple's house the other night--the Scotts. They have lost two beautiful small children to a rare neurological disease that slowly robs its victims of the ability to talk, hear, move, function, yet it spares their brain in that they are aware of what is going on in their little bodies. They felt trapped in a once healthy body and their parents were powerless to stop their deterioration. What kind of hell on earth would that be?

Yet they invited us into their home, cooked us dinner, allowed us to see their children's rooms and pictures, and generally opened their hearts to us. I felt like we were walking on sacred ground. They had moved into this beautiful farm house with a barn to provide a better environment for their children and I felt so special they were willing to share it with us. But more than that, we instantly entered into a level of talking that I think is unusual for a first meeting. We talked about suffering, anger, pain, God, our counselors, our feelings, how we cope with our individual pain, etc. It was beautiful to enter into a real conversation about real things and not pretend like our lives were perfect. Sure, they are angry, confused, raging at God, raging at other people. But that doesn't scare me anymore. Before all this happened with Joseph, I would have been really sympathetic, but not very tolerant of people irate at God. I would have thought it irreverent. Now I see it as a natural honest response, and one that God can handle. And God has shown me the depths of feelings I can experience so when I see those in other people now it doesn't offend me or scare me like it used to. I really felt so blessed that they would share a window into their souls with us.

They are faced with the sobering fact that this world is not it. Their children are now in another place, and as much as we live in this world, our hearts are tied up in another. But the other side of feeling like death is close at hand is feeling like heaven is close at hand. I think so much about heaven now, talk about it almost every day with Holly, and probably view it as a much more real place than I used to. Holly will still say things like, "I like playing with Joe P. the best. But, he's in heaven." Or, "I do have a brother, but he's at heaven." We will often speculate about what he's doing, what he's playing with, if he's watching us and laughing, etc. The Bible says in Hebrews that we are surrounded by a "great cloud of witnesses" who are there cheering us on in the "race marked out for us." I believe that to be true, and I like to imagine Joseph very near, watching, laughing, encouraging, much more present than we can actually see.

I also feel like in worshiping now, the realness of God's presence is so overwhelming I can't help but cry. Every single time I go to church I have a really hard time not weeping openly. I don't completely understand why this is, but I think part of it is that I connect Joseph with Jesus now, so when I am singing to God I can picture Joseph there too, joining in the chorus, and the reality of that is so joyful but then sad that I am just overcome with emotion.

One day all things will be made right. One day things will be perfect. I am confident of that. But for now we live in the in-between, caught in a world of pain and sadness and gross imperfection, yet strangely connected to God and heaven and often catching glimpses of that beauty. It is a tough place to live in--yet the promise of perfection keeps me from losing all hope. One day I will see Joseph's smile again, sing with him, play with him and just enjoy being in God's presence. And there will be no sickness or sin or death. That hope doesn't make the pain of missing him go away, but it does keep me from drowning in it.

Moving Forward

Every day at 1:00 I think of Joseph. It's his naptime. From the time he was about 18 months that has been when his little body turned in for a mid-day rest. Any earlier and he just wasn't ready but if I left it much past then he would start to melt down. I am still trained to think I have something to do at one o'clock every day. Holly is a little more flexible and can make it even until about 3 some days, but usually it is closer to 2:00. But in my head I still think I need to be home at 1:00.

It is things like this that happen every day that make this grieving thing so hard. I really do feel like I'm doing much better, but it's when I randomly feel like announcing that it's Joseph's naptime to our friends at lunch that I wonder if I will ever be normal again. I have so many secret memories and associations that can be triggered at any time, and they can trigger so many different emotions in me. Sometimes I just want to laugh but other times I want to cry.
A few weeks ago we were at the library with some friends and their children. Holly and I came out to the courtyard early before the story time was over and there was another little boy playing by the fountain. I don't see many little boys who look like Joseph but this one reminded me of him so much. He had the exact same sandy hair that was unusually thick for a child. He even was dressed similarly to the way I dressed Joseph. And he had that boisterous personality that we all know and love. Holly just stood and watched him for a while and within a few minutes they were chasing each other and playing. At one point she came over to me and he just came over and smiled to try to win her back. It was so sweet. But I had this crazy thought, "I wonder if I could just watch him for a day...would his mom let me, I wonder?"

Our friends came out shortly after this but I felt like I was just done for the day. I couldn't muster up the strength to have a normal conversation and I know I probably acted a little like a zombie. I was just so overcome by memories and the longing to see my Joseph play with Holly. And I couldn't help just watching him to see if he really acted like Joseph.

My friends may not have noticed, or if they did they weren't bothered, but I am bothered that I can so easily be "not present" when I'm around friends. I have always enjoyed get-togethers and parties and being social, but when I can so easily drift into this world they can't understand it just makes it hard. I feel like I'm the outsider, even though no-one is making me feel this way.
About a month ago I started seeing a counselor to talk about everything and work through some of my feelings. It has been so very helpful and I wish I had done it sooner. At the last meeting she asked me what my goal was--where I'd like to be in a few months. I had a really hard time answering her because on the one hand I don't want to stay in that overwhelming sadness but I don't want to move on and forget Joseph and just pretend like he was never part of our family. So, my answer was that I wanted to be somewhere in the middle--able to live and move forward with hope but to always bring him with us wherever we went. I want Holly and this new baby to know him and see pictures of him and know that he will always be part of our family. The hard part about that is that it will inevitably bring sadness, as we will then have to acknowledge he is no longer with us and that we will be separated from him until heaven. It is hard to even say I want to move forward because it feels like the more we do the farther we move away from him and the time he was with us. But she did encourage me that moving forward is not betraying him, as I had inwardly believed.

I am writing all this because I thought today how many people carry burdens like this all their lives. Maybe it is the memory of abuse or neglect, a deep loss, a struggle with infertility and/or miscarriages, chronic illness, or a painful marriage. And each day they have to struggle against the temptation to be bitter, to just "check out" or give up, or to stay isolated for fear of being abnormal. I guess I realized there is pain all around me and I am not the only one. But thankfully we do have hope. We can bring our burdens to God without trying to minimize them or ignore them and he promises rest. He recognizes that we are weary and burdened (Matt. 11:28) and he offers some relief. He doesn't say, "Cheer up and get on with it," but "Come to me." He will do the changing.

"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."

It's A....

Psalm 139:13-16

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

We went for the 20 week ultrasound and are thrilled to say everything looked great and our little girl is growing and moving around well. It was amazing to see her little fingers and toes moving around. Nana came prepared with two signs, one for a girl and one for a boy. As you can see, we used the girl sign because we are having a girl! Holly has been convinced all along that she is having a sister so she was ecstatic when we told her it really was a sister. When we were leaving, she looked a little disappointed and asked, "When are they going to take the baby out?" She thought we were going to get to really see the baby today, poor thing. It is a long time to wait. But if the next 20 weeks go as fast as the first 20 then it will be here in no time.

We are so thankful for this little growing baby and cannot wait to meet her!

And Allen can look forward to many more tea parties and playing like this:

A 5K for Joe P.!!

We have some more exciting news! Allen's sweet brother, Matt, is organizing a 5K in Joseph's honor. He and his team have come up with a date--October 31st in Nashville, TN at Centennial Park. Mark your calendars and start your training for this fiercely competitive race (Just kidding!). The wonderful Rally Foundation is helping him organize it and all proceeds will go to this foundation to fund childhood cancer research. They will create a website where you may sign up so we will keep you posted about that once it is available. We are so excited about this and are so grateful to Matt and his team for honoring Joseph in this way.

In other Peabody news, we are still planning to move around the end of May/beginning of June. We haven't found a house yet, but at the end of the month I will be going down for a shower and plan to look at some houses then. We have not started packing yet, although that will probably start happening soon (I hope). We accumulated about 5 million new toys this last year, so I'm really dreading tackling that play room. My sister, who is toy-organizer extraordinaire, has promised to help me so I'm holding you to it, SJ!

I've decided to tackle another project--digital picture organizing/printing, just so we have more stuff to pack. :) But, since I haven't printed a single picture since um, 2006, it just has to be done. I have found a great website and it is really easy to upload my many pictures pretty quickly. It has been very sweet to look back at pictures of Joseph and Holly playing together, going to parks, playgroups, etc. They were the cutest little team ever. I know it is crazy to post pictures from over two years ago but I have to share a couple of my favorites (these are February 07):

We wish you all a very happy Easter tomorrow. Yesterday I took Holly to the Resurrection Trail at church and tried to help her understand that Easter is, in fact, about something much bigger and cooler than easter eggs and candy. It was really well done and it made me cherish Christ's sacrifice so much more as I pondered what it meant in real life for us and for Joseph. I think she really understood that Jesus was killed but when I told her that God made him alive again, her face lit up and she was so happy, b/c I also told her that it meant one day she and I and Daddy and Joseph could all be alive together again in heaven (she was quick to add Kellogg to our family). I was so glad we went, though, because sometimes I need things explained to me in kid-terms to make it real in my heart. At the end of the trail all these children dressed as angels were exclaiming, "He is risen!" and it was such a beautiful glimpse of heaven to me and made me feel like we were close to Joseph. We really can only imagine the beauty but I know it has to be staggering. This Easter I am so thankful for the miracle of the resurrection and the sacrifice of Jesus that allows us to have confidence in our eternity.

Good Hair Day

The other day, Allen and Holly were jumping on the trampoline, and Allen comes in laughing and saying, "Quick, where's the camera?" I was on the phone, so I'm running around trying to still listen while frantically trying to locate the memory card and the camera. We finally put the two together and Allen ran off to complete his mission.

All our efforts paid off, as they resulted in capturing this:



And this:

Hope it makes you laugh as much as it did for us.

We are on vacation at the beach, but will post some more pictures soon. Hope everyone is enjoying some warm weather.

And, if you didn't win during my last giveaway, you can have another chance! Go to:

http://itsalmostnaptime.blogspot.com/search/label/giveaways

for a chance to win some of that gorgeous stationery (and also to find one of the funniest blogs you will every read).

Sleepy

One of the predominant side effects of my pregnancy thus far is sleepiness. I am very blessed and grateful that so far in pregnancies I haven't had very bad morning sickness. But sleepiness I have. For a while there I was sleeping around 9 hours at night plus a 2 hour nap every day, and if I didn't get that I was just useless by 7:00 (I guess of all the pregnancy ailments you can have, this isn't so bad). I'm starting to feel a little more energetic which I am really glad about, because you just don't feel very productive when you sleep in your spare time. (I am 13 1/2 weeks, by the way.)

Being so tired, I just started feeling like I was living half-awake. And then I wondered, "Is this from pregnancy or am I just not really engaging in life?" I think it is probably a little of both. I read a devotional today (Morning and Evening by Spurgeon) and the verse was:

"Let us not sleep, as do others." 1 Thessalonians 5:6

How fitting! I love how God never fails to suprise me with how much he is NOT asleep and is very much aware of my life.

He writes, "Christians who isolate themselves and walk alone, are very liable to grow drowsy. Hold Christian company and you will be kept wakeful by it, and refreshed and encouraged to make quicker progress in the road to heaven."

I am pregnant and sleepy, but I also haven't made much effort to spend good quality time talking with friends on a deep level. I think I have isolated myself a bit and I didn't even realize it. Then this week an old friend called me and we went walking and just really talked and then at the end of our walk she prayed for me. It was so refreshing and good for my soul and I wondered "Why don't we do this more??"

Then last night after Bible Study I had a really great talk with a dear friend and I surprised myself by how much I shared with her and how much I really NEEDED to talk about some things. I guess sometimes I don't really even realize what I'm thinking or feeling until I talk about it...and lately I just haven't been doing much talking.

So early this morning (probably around 8:00) I got a phone call from another dear friend from Atlanta who I haven't talked to in many months. She said she was thinking about me so much this morning and usually she will pray for someone if they keep coming to mind, but in my case she felt she just had to call. I was so encouraged to just talk with her and to know that God had prompted her to call me. She was able to listen to how I am doing and give me hope that God can lift me out of it and it is really good to be honest with Him first.

I have been wrestling with feelings of anger over Joseph dying and then I feel guilty for being angry, which makes me just avoid God and really everyone. It's just overwhelming to have so many emotions, often conflicting, but then also to just go about everyday life as if life is normal. I guess I feel like I have been permanently maimed but nobody can see it, so I feel different but know I don't look all that different from other people.

All of it is enough to make me want to retreat into my own little world and keep everyone out...but I'm sensing God is nudging me out of that...keeping me from drowsiness. At first I thought, "I just need to really work on opening up and taking the initiative with friends," but then God took the initiative for me, as He always does. I still want to be intentional with talking more freely with God and with good friends about my feelings, but it was nice that He gave these little gifts this week.

I always want to be awake to the love of God, to his beauty all around me, and not become so distracted or dejected that it's like I'm living life asleep. Have you been refreshed and encouraged this week? I hope and pray so. And if not, I hope God will send a friend to brighten your day and remind you of His deep love for you, even while you are in the midst of deep sorrow and darkness.

Some News to Share....

Can you tell someone is excited about becoming a big sister?

We are so grateful and excited to share that we are expecting a baby in September 2009. We thank God for this gift and for allowing us the joy of another child. We had our first ultrasound a few weeks ago and got to see the heartbeat. Our sweet doctor gave Holly the picture and the first thing Holly did was kiss it.

We are planning to move back to Altlanta around the end of May and Allen will begin his orientation mid-June. I am getting more and more excited about moving back, even though it will be so hard to leave Nashville. But it will be great to be around old friends and be involved in our old church again. And I had a great doctor there who delivered Holly so we will most likely go back to her.

Well, blog-friends, I'm so glad I've gotten to share this news with you. It has been so hard to write on here and not talk about it because it has been on my mind so much, so I'm glad it is out in the open now. Hope you all are doing well. And thank you for supporting Team Joe P. I think the event was a big success.