Dylan's birthday

So let's be honest, I was very worried about his 1 year birthday coming up.  I have always been a big birthday person (most likely due to my mom and all her decorations :) ) Every week, I would decorate Dylan's pod (that's what they called his "space/area" at CHW... it is most def NOT a room) for his weekly birthday.  It was an achievement for him to get another week older and bigger, so I thought it should be celebrated.

So I knew that we had two options. 1) we could live it up and celebrate our beautiful boy or 2) mope around all day.

The choice was pretty simple.

Patrick and I had some alone time in the morning to watch of few of our Dylan videos.  Then we went to the lakefront, the same place we had our maternity pictures taken actually.

one of my favorite maternity pics

8.14.2012

After that we needed to run some errands, and pick up some balloons... that's a whole other story (but thanks Georgia for helping us out!)

We had our immediate family over to help us celebrate, Patrick did an excellent job grilling (as usual).  We had attended the walk for hope a few weeks ago where they had done a balloon release and we really enjoyed it.  I thought it would be fun to let the kids on our block participate in that as well, as many of them saw me pregnant and knew that baby Dylan was in heaven.  And they all wanted to!
(see above picture with everyone gathered in our front yard)

We had paper and markers available for people to write messages if they wanted.  Patrick read my letter to Dylan and we counted down. 5...4...3...2...1 and let them go

Words can't fully describe how much I miss my little boy.

Continuing to do things like this and doing things in his name and honor help us get through the days, knowing that he lives on in us and in others.

Thanks to everyone again who thought about us, texted, called, or sent cards.  And thank you to our wonderful block of neighbors who participated.  <3