Last week, my brother called and asked if we were going to church on Easter Sunday.
“Probably,” I said. “Dave doesn’t want to go, but I bought Catie a dress, so I’m pretty sure that at the very least, she and I are going.”
“Can I come stay with y’all this weekend and tag along?” he asked. “I don’t want Dad to give me any grief about not going to church on Easter.”
For the record, my brother will be 32 years old next month. My dad’s guilt trips are that good.
So my brother drove over from Charlotte and stayed with us on Saturday night. I think Catie likes him a little bit.
Maybe. I don’t know. Hard to say, really.
Then the Easter Bunny came on Saturday night. He did pretty well.
I think Catie might decide that the Easter Bunny is cooler than Santa Claus. After playing with her loot, we got dressed up and went to church.
I’m kicking myself for not getting a family picture while we were all dressed up (since it seems to happen so rarely). Oh well. Better luck next time, I guess.
It was a nice service, and we went out for brunch afterward. Then my brother headed home, causing Catie to have a major meltdown. Or maybe it was just too close to naptime and she was crashing after her Easter chocolate bender. Who knows. Two year-olds are confusing.
After Catie’s nap, we went for a walk in our neighborhood greenway. I didn’t have my camera with me, but I’m pretty impressed with the quality of the pictures that my iPhone takes. I really love the evening light in this one.
It was a really good day. Hope that wherever you were, you had a good day too.
And even though we won’t be in California for the memorial service, we still intend to wear purple on Tuesday. We might even release a balloon for Maddie, if I can find a purple balloon somewhere.
Also, if you haven’t donated to the Spohrs yet, and needed a little extra motivation to do so, the beautiful and talented Yvonne at Joy Unexpected is doing a giveaway – for every $10 you give, you can enter for a chance to win a Nikon Coolpix camera. Or you can go to InstaMom, where she’s doing the same giveaway thing, but with a Nintendo DSi. Can’t hurt, right?
Hope everyone had a nice Easter. I’ll write more about ours tomorrow. In the meantime, hug your babies and eat some chocolate. Easter is the one day of the year that chocolate has no calories. (What, you didn’t know that? It’s totally true.)
The last day and a half has been a roller-coaster of emotions as we all grieve for the Spohr family and the loss of their baby Maddie. Yesterday I felt the need to do something – sure I gave money to the PayPal account that was set up to help them with funeral expenses, and I donated money to the March of Dimes, but it didn’t seem like enough. I know that the Spohrs and several of their friends and family are going to be participating in the March for Babies, a fundraiser for the March of Dimes. I heard someone on Twitter talk about participating in the March for Babies fundraiser in their own city, in Maddie’s honor. I thought it seemed like a great idea, and went to see if Raleigh had an event coming up. Turns out, we do.
I know most people who read this have probably already given money to the Spohr family on Maddie’s behalf, and if so, that’s wonderful. I also realize that money is tight for everyone right now. So there’s no pressure, but if you should happen to feel extra generous and if you have a few extra dollars lying around, please consider sponsoring us as we walk for our team, “In Memory of Madeline Alice Spohr.”
Also, if you’re in the Raleigh area and want to join us on our walk, here’s the link for our team page. Please consider signing up to come along. We’d love to have you. If you are walking with us, please consider buying a “Marching for Maddie” t-shirt. All proceeds go to the Spohr family. We’ll all be wearing them – I even got an extra-small t-shirt for Catie. (She’ll be in the stroller, not walking. Three miles is a bit much for a 2 year-old.)
I know this isn’t much, but at least it feels like we’re doing something. That’s pretty much all we can ask for at this point.
Yesterday I wrote that post about Maddie being in the hospital, asking for prayers and well wishes. I was worried and a little freaked out, but I thought that surely everything would be alright. Maddie’s been in the hospital before, and she’s always pulled through. She’s a baby, for heaven’s sake. Bad things don’t happen to babies, right?
Unfortunately, I was wrong. Last night I was going to bed, and thought I’d check Twitter on my iPhone one last time. I hadn’t heard an update about Maddie for a while, and I was hoping to hear some good news before I went to bed. I saw an update from Heather, that just said, “Madeline.” It was followed by this link, and when I read the post that said Maddie had passed away, I sat up in bed and started saying, “Oh no, oh god no, oh NO.” I burst into tears, and ran downstairs to tell Dave. I barely managed to get the words out, I was crying so hard. I sat down at my laptop, left a comment on Heather’s blog and sent a few tweets about it, but I honestly can’t remember what I said because I was sobbing and shaking the whole time.
I just can’t wrap my head around it. This isn’t supposed to be the end of Maddie’s story. She wasn’t even 17 months old yet. We were supposed to be reading Heather’s blog in 4 years as she talked about Maddie’s first day of kindergarten. We were supposed to commiserate and laugh along with her in 12 years when Maddie became an insufferable teenager. This just can’t be right. Tragedies like this don’t actually happen to people in real life, do they?
I keep thinking of something I read once: that if you lose your spouse, you’re a widow or widower. If you’re a child who loses your parents, you’re an orphan. But there is no word in the English language for a parent who loses a child. I think that’s because the idea is just too horrible for us to comprehend. It goes against the way the world is supposed to work – the next generation is supposed to grieve the loss of its elders, not the other way around.
Last night when I finally tried to go to sleep, I ended up continuing to read the updates on Twitter, tears dripping onto my iPhone. I desperately wanted to go get Catie out of her crib and bring her to bed to sleep with us for the night, but I didn’t. I don’t remember what time I finally fell asleep. I slept horribly, I kept waking up and thinking about Heather, Mike, and baby Maddie. When Catie woke up, I heard her on the baby monitor, singing the theme song from “Thomas the Tank Engine” quietly to herself in her crib. I started to cry thinking about how lucky I was, and how unfair the world is sometimes. Heather and Mike don’t deserve this pain. Nobody does.
I am just devastated and gutted by this tragedy. It may not seem like much, but if you’re as moved by the Spohrs’ story as I am, please consider giving to the March of Dimes on Maddie’s behalf. They do a lot of work to try to help premature babies like Maddie. Here’s the link to Maddie’s MoD page.
Rest in peace, baby Maddie. You’ve touched the lives of so many, even those who never got a chance to meet you.
I know a lot of y’all read Heather over at The Spohrs Are Multiplying. She’s one of my favorite bloggers, and just a super-cool chick. If you’ve been reading her blog or following her on Twitter, you might already know that right now her baby girl Maddie is in the hospital. They don’t know what’s wrong, it’s not RSV or the flu, but her latest update said that they’re going to intubate Maddie.
I’m just sitting here crying and clutching Catie to me, I cannot imagine what Heather and Mike are going through right now. I know Catie doesn’t have the preemie issue to deal with like Maddie does, but she does have the asthma/lung issues, so this all just feels very close to home for me. I’ve been following Maddie’s journey on Heather’s blog for a long time, I feel like I know them, and this whole thing has me so worried and freaked out for them.
If any of you are the praying type, please throw some out there for Maddie, Heather and Mike. And if you’re not, just send positive healthy-baby vibes (and “stay strong, Mommy & Daddy” vibes) in the general direction of L.A. I know they’ll appreciate it.
I’m having one of these weeks where there’s a bunch of stuff sort of swirling around in my head that I’m having a hard time sorting out. I can’t even write it out of my system, because I’m feeling all scatter-brained and sort of like I have ADD (which is odd, because that’s usually Dave’s department). So instead, I’m going to talk about something fun and superficial.
Kristen over at Motherhood Uncensored has started a challenge for other bloggers to try to get in shape along with her own journey, and she started a whole separate blog to talk about it. Most of them are doing the 30-Day Shred, which I tried to do and it totally screwed up my knees. (Which is not Jillian Michaels’ fault at all. I have bad knees. It runs in my family.)
But this month, they’re mixing it up with the two different trainers from the Biggest Loser, so there’s Team Jillian (the people doing the 30-Day Shred) and Team Bob. I found out that Bob has a DVD called “Weight Loss Yoga,” which sounded ideal for me. I love yoga, I want to lose weight, and yoga shouldn’t mess up my knees. So I ordered the DVD from Amazon and signed myself up for Team Bob.
I took “before” pictures, which I will not be posting until I have cute “after” pictures because OMG, I have a huge ass. (Sorry, Catie. That runs in the family too.) I mean, I knew I had a big butt, but seeing the profile photo of me wearing yoga pants? Good heavens. Scary.
Today was the first day, and it seems to be a really good workout. Much harder than your average yoga routine, and I’m pretty sure that I’m going to be very, very sore later. My only complaint is that the music is awful. It sounds like a bad video game soundtrack; seriously, it’s a little “Legend of Zelda”-ish. So I’m going to have to make an iTunes playlist and play it along with the DVD so I don’t go insane.
Other than that, though, I’m pretty excited. It should be a lot of fun, and maybe the yoga will be good for helping me clear my head of all this randomness.
In case you missed the drama about my website last week, here’s the short version: my website went down for 3 days, and when it finally came back online, all of my data was gone. Every last entry since I started this blog 6 years ago? Gone. So I was a tiny bit distraught, as you might imagine.
While I was freaking out, I wrote about it on Twitter, and within a few minutes, I got a response from a web hosting company called PinchHost offering to help me. They’re a new company, and didn’t have much of a proven track record that I could find online, but I appreciated how fast they responded. Especially considering that the customer service at my old (then-current) web hosting company, Globat, was always somewhat lacking. It’s basically impossible to get anyone on the phone, they take an extremely long time to respond to email support tickets, and while yes, they do have support via live chat, the techs aren’t exactly helpful. Usually the only response I get is, “We’re so sorry for your inconvenience, and thank you for your patience.” Not exactly top-notch problem-solving.
But really, my main problem with Globat is the availability. They were fine when I first signed up a few years ago, but over the past year or so, my website crashed a lot, because I seemed to always be under Denial of Service attacks by spammers. So that’s my main beef with them – if you can’t keep my website running, I’ll go host it elsewhere.
Meanwhile, during that whole incident where I had no blog entries at all? I threw a temporary WordPress blog here that you might’ve seen if you happened to click over here. On it, I mentioned that my last manual backup of my website was from May 2008, hence my panic. (So all the entries about selling our house, moving to North Carolina, the holidays, Catie’s 2nd birthday? GONE.) Then the tech from PinchHost – the same guy who responded to me on Twitter – left me a comment telling me that he had gone through Google’s cache of my archives and found about 100 entries from May 2008 to now, and saved them to a zip file for me to download.
Which, DUDE. I wasn’t even a customer of his, and he did all that legwork for me? Yeah ok, they’re a new company, but with that type of customer service, I’ll take a chance on them. So I switched over yesterday, and it was basically seamless. I might be imagining it, but my website even seems to load faster now. Obviously, I am very happy with them so far.
Of course, the hard part now is cancelling my account with Globat. They’re notorious for having a crappy billing department, so I know I’m in for a fight. Example: over the past few years I’ve gotten over 100 emails from them telling me about new offers, and unless I clicked the link to opt out, they automatically charged my credit card for the upgrade, regardless of whether or not I wanted it. If I called afterward to say, “hey, you billed me for this, and I don’t want it, so give me my money back,” they’d try to hem & haw and squirm their way out of refunding me the money for a service I’m not using. So, yeah. I’ve gotta get my Don’t You Dare Try to Eff With Me, Buddy hat on and let them have it.
But the fact that I’m now basically done with them and have a cool new hosting company that actually responds to my problems promptly and seems to give a damn about my user experience? It kind of makes me feel like one of these dancers.
(If you haven’t seen that yet, you’re welcome. I’ve watched it about four times already and I smile like a moron at my computer and get all misty-eyed every time. What can I say, I’m a sucker for “The Sound of Music.”)
