I’m just going to hit upon a few things in one post.
1. Julia’s feet.
Julia has been just impossible to buy shoes for for several years. She things everything is uncomfortable and everything slips at the heel. Lately I have been noticing her ankles seem turned in. We made a last ditch effort to buy her some shoes last weekend at the Stride Rite factory outlet with no success. So – today we went downtown to the local Stride Rite store. It is a full-service kids shoe store. They took one look at her and said that she had “somewordIcan’tremember” which meant that she turns in her ankles. So we decided we should also buy her some new tennis shoes because they were going to put inserts in to help her walking. About an hour and a half later and $144 less we left with new tennis shoes and brown Mary-Janes with inserts glued into them. They said she has “princess feet” and said her heels are especially narrow. I hope these shoes help her and last for quite a while as well!
2. Food
Bonus thing about being in the north downtown area is one of my favorite lunch restaurants is there – Paninos. I got hooked on their spaghetti pie panini when I worked downtown. We had lunch there. Yum!
3. Cemetary
After lunch we went to the cemetary. As I wrote last week, the girls had been asking to go there having not been there before (Lauren has but doesn’t remember). We decided it was a beautiful fall day and a good day to go. Side note that it is in the 80s today – It snowed on Wednesday. So – we showed the girls Nathan’s creche in the columbarium. Click here and here and for my posts about the columbarium and some pictures. Anyway – they got to see it and trace his name with their fingers. We walked around some of the gravestones. I mentioned that there is an area in the cemetery with children’s graves and Lauren really wanted to see that so we drove over there and saw my friend Sherry’s daughter’s grave. Nevaeh also died of neuroblastoma. It was really sad seeing all these graves of little children and for me it reinforced several of the reasons why we didn’t bury Nathan. We would like to install a bench near the columbarium and are going to look into whether that would even be possible. After we left, and during some, Julia kept saying over and over again, in a cheery voice, “Nathan’s not really here, he’s in heaven”. She kept saying it so much that we finally asked her to stop saying it. You could tell she was really trying to convince herself it was true.
4. How Great Thou Art
If you recall, in my last entry, I mentioned the hymn last Sunday was “How Great Thou Art” and talked about how Julia wailed through that as it was sung as a solo at Nathan’s service and how hard it is for me to hear it. In fact, when I sat through the last part of the second service with Luke last Sunday we bolted out as the hymn started up since it was the last hymn. So, much to my dismay, I saw at choir rehearsal this week that one of the songs being done this Sunday is a solo version of “How Great Thou Art”. Are you kidding me? I really wanted to go to church and sing this Sunday but I don’t know if I can sit through that! Plus I am not just sitting – I am on display up in the choir loft. Do we really want to risk Julia hearing this solo version and start having flashbacks? I don’t know if she remembers it but music is a very potent way to bring up memories. At this point, we just don’t know what we are going to do about church tomorrow morning. I actually sat through a rendition of it in the past year but it was at a funeral and so being teary-eyed was the norm. So – we’ll see….
That’s all I’ve got for now. It seems that there have been a lot of grief things lately. I guess that is my life!
