Celebrating Weed #39

There are always those little pangs of missing, sometimes those gut punches...whatever form they take, I miss her.  And so again as her birthday comes around, it's there.  And how can I make it better, the not having her here to celebrate with and wish her a happy day?  So I try to think of what I could do and wonder how her kids and Derek are doing with this, and how our other kids are handling it.  There's no perfect way to 'fix' it.  Thank goodness for our eternal perspective or it would be unbearable.  I don't want to bring it up because I don't want to make it hurt, but I want to do something.  So I put it off...and then it's here and it's time.  This year, as usual, I didn't want to bring it up, and decided to go to the temple to honor the service Weed was always doing for others by doing some service there.  And it was good.  We had one daughter that needed to be sealed to her parents.  How appropriate...to seal one daughter to her parents as we remember that this daughter is sealed to us.  And it was also interesting that this daughter we sealed was just known as Miss Crane.  No first name, but even though she is somewhat unknown any more personally than that, she is known very personally to Heavenly Father.  Just as we are each known to and loved by Him.  So, that was a good way to honor Weed for me and I hope so for Paul.  I felt like crying as I was the was proxy for the daughter and had a hard time holding the tears back, but after it was done I felt much better and happy!

But then I wanted to do something with the kids.  We came up with the idea to have them over the evening before and eat dinner and play games or whatever.  It evolved into a really fun evening.  Paul picked them up and we met at the DSU Sear's Art Show (something we used to go to with Weed and kids on President's day usually) and did the I Spy activity and enjoyed the beautiful art.  The docent was a rather crabby lady who wanted us to know that she didn't want to stay late and in fact wanted to leave 15 minutes early, but we still had a good time and finished up on time to keep her happy!  Then we came home and ate a meal, not as good as I wanted it to be, but we had fun eating/talking together.  Afterwards we mixed up our family recipe of chocolate chip cookies...the ones Weed always used to make and share with others.  Juge told us about their family tradition of making the eggs slide into the batter and we included that!  We baked some of the batter in little bowls and then topped them with ice cream...so we had an appropriate birthday cake for Weed!  And we told jokes and laughed and were silly while we did it.  She would have enjoyed that too.  And we looked at the kid pics in the hall to see how cute Weed, and the other kids were as they grew up into the beautiful people they are.  And as we looked at pics on the way out the door we got sidetracked and it was perfect because we looked through the picture book we made of Weed and enjoyed family memories shown there.  Then it was late and time to take everyone home to get to bed.  It was an evening well spent and was good for the heart.  Tomorrow is the actual day and we will go out to a dinner with our kids and Derek and the kids.  And that will be good too.  Happy Birthday Dear Weed (Lenae).  We love you, we miss you and we will see you again!

We took quick pics of people with favorites.  I love this beautiful fused glass "Through the Forest"  by Mercedes Skegro.  Good thing it's already sold.  If I had money for it, I would want it.  The artist had some great quotes on her site:

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."  Pablo Picasso

She's a refugee from Croatia and also had the quote, "Give me liberty, or give me death."  Patrick Henry  

As we were looking through the photo book we saw some funny pics of Weed in goggles.  Kaebri sent me this funny goggle collage of ones I didn't have.  Weed always had on her 'happy goggles' even when life was hard.  She smiled her way through hard things and worked hard to keep others smiling too.  

 Dinner with a fun remembering what we did with Weed game, a visit the the grave and cake at the
house.  It was perfect!  We missed Jay and Supe, but life happens.

Note:  See journal entry for 2-28-19 for more thoughts on Weed at this time.