Day 133 of 365 Days of Being Thankful

These lovely flowers are from Joe, Kat, Gabby and Kaylee.

        Today is Mother's Day. I am thankful that I am a mother of five.
This is such a bittersweet day for me.  Living without one of your children is the worst pain anyone can ever feel.  I am thankful that I had Amy for almost 19 years but I will never get over losing her. Amy was the sweetest child ever.  When she was a baby, she would sing herself to sleep and sing in the morning when she woke up. Her personality stayed like that her entire short life. Bereaved moms live a grief journey until they die. We miss our deceased child and we miss the chance to "mother" them.  But mostly, we miss that they do not have the opportunity to finish living their lives. Each and every one of us would gladly give up our own lives to let our child live out their life.

I try to be grateful for the years that all of my children were alive. I am thankful that we adopted Olivia and Olya and that they are part of our lives. I will always be thankful to Ukraine for giving me two of my most precious gifts. The gift of adoption is as powerful as the gift of giving birth.(and no labor pains!!!!) Today at church our minister wished a Happy Mother's Day to many different types of moms, biological moms, adoptive moms, moms who lost their moms, women who were not able to be moms but wanted to be, and daughters estranged from their moms but he didn't mentions moms who lost a child.  I think that is because it is not a normal thing that happens.

        Both girls worked all day Saturday. Dan and I cleaned out the garage, it looks so nice and clean and organized now! I think the biggest part of organizing any area is the purging of items.  We threw away three trash cans full of trash and discarded items. And we could have gotten rid of a lot more! I am thankful that it looks good now!
 
         Yesterday Dan and I went and bought several  trays of flowers to plant. That is what I wanted for Mother's Day! I have more than enough jewelry and more than enough clothes and handbags. I really don't want anything other than plants. I love flowers!  He helped me weed out front and plant the new annual flowers in pots.  My front gardens were covered in sticker bush weeds.

. I hate those sharp stickers.  They have such deep roots. Dan dug out every single one of those weeds! They sort of look like marijuana plants! I'm sure I'd get lots of volunteer weeders if that was the case!  Olivia and Olya  each filled one planter with flowers(sort of under duress but they did it).  I've decided that if they want to use my car or Dan's car, they are going to do a job first.  They use a lot of gas which Dan and I always pay for. We filled about ten planters but ran out of potting soil.   We still have more flowers to plant and planters to fill! It rained last night, the plants were really dry so I am sure they just soaked up the rain fall!  We went to Walmart to get weed killer but they didn't have any.
         Olivia asked me what Dan and I were going to do tonight.  I told her that we were supposed to go to dinner with friends but one of them was sick so we were going to reschedule.  I told her that she lucked out because she wouldn't have had a car to use if we were going out to dinner!  She said well, the, thank you to Jackie for cancelling but not for Carol being sick! Olivia loves Jackie, and Carol and Nancy so she would never wish for any of them to be sick.  It worked out just fine for Olivia! We will just reschedule dinner soon!

planted by Olya

planted by Olivia

 

 

        

 
 

We finally got to see the goslings! They are fairly big so I think they are about two weeks old at least, maybe a bit older. The gander won't let us go near the place they are nesting. Dan had seen white shells in the nest but we had never seen the babies until today.

  Dan saw two other large geese in our yard so we have a gaggle of geese!  You can see the babies in the grass.