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Donna's Diary Entries Diary Navigation: Choose A Diary Entry -------------------- Latest Entry: 5/19/07 -------------------- 4/21/07 3/11/07 2/9/07 1/9/07, Entry 2 12/22/06 12/11/06 11/28/06 11/20/06 11/15/06 11/10/06 11/1/06 10/24/06 10/17/06 10/11/06 10/3/06 9/25/06 9/17/06 9/11/06 9/6/06 8/27/06 8/20/06 8/13/06 8/6/06 7/30/06 7/23/06 7/16/06 7/9/06 7/4/06 6/25/06 6/19/06 6/11/06 6/4/06 -------------------- Donna's Introduction

07/16/06 - Our friends' tragedy, television mini-series, and new tattoo

July 16, 2006

Today I was supposed to write about another birthday party we were going to.  But instead we ended up going to a funeral.  On Tuesday, my husband's friend's wife was driving with her 8-month-old daughter in the back and got in an accident.  A van hit her vehicle where the baby's car seat was.  They both went to the hospital, she with broken bones, and the baby with head trauma.  Sadly, the baby died the next day.  So the wake was today, and Justin stayed at my neighbor's house for a couple of hours.  I have been to three other funerals in my life and they were for my grandparents and my father.  But a baby's or child's funeral is the worst.  I almost lost it before we even walked through the door of the room she was in, because I looked over and saw they had an open casket and I could see her head.  When I walked up to her, she looked more like a doll than a baby, but knowing that there was indeed a baby in this tiny box was the most terrible, unfair feeling.  Her parents were numb with grief, her mom clutching a picture of her.  I am praying for God to watch over this baby in Heaven, and give strength to her parents and the rest of her family to get through this.  I cannot imagine how I would deal with losing my son, and I pray I never have to find out.

On a lighter note, there is a mini-series on Wednesday nights for four weeks called Nightmares and Dreamscapes.  It is a book of short stories by Stephen King, and each week is two stories.  So far I was able to stay up for the first episode.  The first story I had read so I knew what was going to happen, but the second one was kind of creepy.  I like that sort of thing though.  As I've probably mentioned, I am not a big television watcher, but every once in a while something comes on that I want to see, and I have to specifically stay up or change my routine to be able to watch it.  Before Justin was born, I used to read a lot.  I still love to read, but it takes me longer now to finish books because I don't seem to have as much time or energy.  Maybe I will start including book reviews, although I don't know if they will actually be reviews.  I tend to read authors that I already know I like, so I am a bit biased there.  Right now, I am reading Cell by Stephen King, which I've been working on for months, and The Journey by Billy Graham, which I just started a few days ago.

Yesterday, Justin went to the babysitter and we had our monthly day alone.  This time I got a new tattoo.  It is a blue butterfly on the back of my shoulder and above it says "Dad" and below it the years of his birth and death.  It's a fitting tattoo for what happened this week, but certainly not planned that way.  I had this design in my head for a while.  When we got home from doing that, I had a pile of paperwork, bills to pay, pictures to print, and scrapbook to update, so I sat with that stuff for a couple of hours and got caught up.

In Justin news, the camp shirts came in last week.  They are red, same as last year.  They decorated hats and sunglasses, went on a big slide, and had a Hawaiian day.  Justin has a blue Hawaiian shirt from last year that still fits.  His behavior has not improved much, but I am trying so hard to be patient.  His latest annoying habits are throwing toys at us and taking a sip of his drink and then spitting it out of his mouth.  He does these things after we tell him over and over again that they are not nice things to do, and he laughs while he is doing it.  On the positive side, he is pretty much potty trained during the day, and wears cloth training pants all day and pull-ups at night.  He has been doing really well with it since April, still having accidents, but they are becoming less and less.  Sometimes, he wakes up dry in the morning, so we may start letting him wear the training pants at night soon and see how that goes.  I don't have any new pictures to include from the past week, so here is one from our Great Adventure trip last month, of Justin on the carousel.

Donna and Justin

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