May 2016

May 2 and it was finally not pouring rain and freezing cold. And a bit of sunshine helped with all our moods. It was extremely muddy but Bryan had started on a deck by the pool and was determined to use the nicer weather to work on it.

Jayme and Trey gave Poppy an early birthday present of a new bike. She was pretty proud of it.

May 8 Jayme and Kash came out so we set up a goofy little doggie photo shoot. It cracked us up. 

May 9 and work on the deck is continuing. I took this to show how much mud we were slogging through. I say "we" because I helped a little. Hahaha

He is a hard worker!

An evening thunderstorm put a stop to his work. 

But we went back out and worked between storms and got this far.

May 10 and I had a lunch date with Poppy. She loves Chick-fil-a just like her dad.

May 13 and it is really starting to look like a deck!

May 14 and suddenly there is a railing going up!

May 16 completed project and it is pouring rain so...not using that deck yet. But it looks AMAZING!

May 17 Poppy wanted to go to Pioneers Park. So off we went and then we did the nature hike.

May 19 last day of school and my last day with the kids as their babysitter. 

They came for our annual last day of school overnight. 

We played a rousing game of soccer with boy against girls. 

We made stepping stones for Letti's Garden.

And a Griser kids memory toys stone.

May 20 we mostly just relaxed and watched a movie and hung out.

May 25 huge wind took out a tree that has withstood many storms.

A nest fell out and these red-wing blackbird eggs were on the lawn. Such beautiful eggs.

Memorial Day and I had finally gotten the pool clean enough to swim in. Not clear but clean. 

Jayme and Poppy tried fishing but didn't catch anything. Trey, Jayme, Poppy, Ashley and a couple friends of Jayme and Trey's came out for the evening.

May 31 this kids came back out for an overnight before they moved away the next day. It was a bit of an emotional roller coaster month. Lots of letting go. Andrea took this picture of all of us in Letti's Garden with the stepping stones we made.

Cloudy and not super nice but they wanted to swim! So swim they did. A couple of their friends came out to swim with them and have supper.

Amiah and I played a rousing game of Yardzee. Obviously the camera person couldn't get a non-blurry shot... 

This brings us to the end of May. Interspersed into all these activities were days when grief was overwhelming and those were days that we just let ourselves have and know that it is ok that other people's lives were going on and ours still felt like it was at a painful standstill at times. Letti would have been a month old. So starkly a before Letti and after marking of time. Bobbi was still physically healing from surgery and so wasn't back at work yet. Travis, unfortunately, was experiencing some major stress at his job and that was definitely something they did not need. Lots of prayers, lots of tears, lots of questions. And May turned to June.