July, 2010:

He put two fingers in his nose yesterday, one in each nostril.  Nice!!!  He’s 100% boy.  The two of them are complete opposites.

She’s been emotional lately.  We had a long weekend.  Water Park on Friday, Cubs game and birthday party on Saturday, another birthday party Sunday and then GC took them to the Morton Arboretum today.  They’ve been busy.  Tomorrow is Teddy Bear Camp for E.  It wouldn’t be so bad but the humidity here is ridiculous.  We might as well be living in Florida.

She is so freaking cute.  She says, “I love you so much Daddy.”  She wants me to sleep in her bed with her (it’s nearly impossible to leave after reading her a book but somehow I make my way back downstairs).  It’s impossible to explain this in words.

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I’m seriously struggling with the idea of dating.  The thought has been there for a while.  I could certainly approach it as meeting some new people and that’s probably what I will do.  Still, I have this thing whole situation on my mind, all the time, and I have no idea how it will ever go away. 

It would be one thing if we weren’t madly in love with each other, but we were. 

It seems impossible for me to ever get to that point again with someone else.  Not that I’m eager for that, but I think about it.  It would be a whole lot of effort that I am probably incapable of .

And then I think about divorcee’s and how their situation differs (in my mind).  They, most likely, put a lot of energy into disliking the other person or at least being put into a situation where there was an agreeable split.  I will never have that.  So somehow I guess I have to create and/or accept some concept of a separation.  Those are my thoughts anyways.

So, I just needed to get some of that out.  This post is far from complete but I’m exhausted.  I went running (jogging) tonight for the first time since my surgery and I’m feeling it.  I doubt I’ll be able to go to bed but I should at least give it a try.

I remember seeing the soprano’s cook book at bed bath and beyond forever ago and thinking the tv show branded book was a bit overboard.  Then Cari bought it for me, for christmas I think.  We made a couple meals from the book; they were two of our fav’s.  Possibly our top 2 favorites. Rigatoni w/Broccoli & Penne alla Vodka.  There were both so good.  The first time she made the Penne she thought she totally messed it up.  It wasn’t bad.  She was still sensitive about her cooking since that first time she tried to cook gnocchi (it really wasn’t  that good – we tried to joke about it but she didn’t take it well even though she knew it was bad too).  Anyways, tonight I cooked the Rigatoni while trying to attend to my little man who is totally non-stop.  It just wasn’t the same.  It made me sad.  It makes me sad just thinking about it now.  It’s just a dish but I miss her so much it hurts.

E didn’t nap today.  She went to a butterfly class at the zoo with GC.  The pictures are cute and it looks like she had a ton of fun.  But no nap means a crabby kid and she’s been crabby for a few days so as soon as I got to Grandma’s I didn’t hesitate to pack them up and head home.  She was passed out about 10 minutes into the ride.  It’s been 4 hours and she’s still sleeping.  Either she’s going to go the whole night or she’s going to wake up and it’s going to be a long night for me.  She’s done this a couple other times, where she falls asleep in the car and makes it til the morning.  I’m not keeping my fingers crossed but let’s hope she stays asleep … of course now that I said it I’m screwed!  Anyways…. When I got home with them I put her on the couch and me and lil guy played outside until I needed to get in and feed him.  I was cooking and everything was quiet, which is a bad sign when quiet involves him.  Quiet usually means something is up.  And it was.  I came into the family room and he crawled on top of her and was getting ready to bite her leg (well maybe not bite but it looked like it).  If I didn’t mind her waking up I would have let them be to go grab the camera but instead I yanked him off and tried to redirect his attention.  He was fine for a bit but then I found him up on top of her a couple more times.  So eventually I grabbed her and brought her up to her bed.  They are such opposites.  Quiet for her usually meant she was perfectly content.  Not him though.

In addition to the whole dinner thing, someone sent me a video taken when my daughter was maybe 6 months.  Most of the video is of her and I but then it panned over to Cari …

I’ve been laying out in the sun more this summer than I have in a while.  I’d have to say my tan is looking pretty damn good.  No more farmers tan.  Cari would be pissed that I’m doing it now and wasn’t as interested in being out there the last few years.  I do like the sun, always have, but I like it in small doses.  She liked it for hours at a time. 

I procrastinated and now it’s very unlikely I’m going to san diego for this widow’s conference that’s happening in a few weeks.  It’s on a busy weekend for work so it was unlikely anyways.  I should go, or I should have planned to go because I’m sure I would have found it beneficial.  It’s all women though, or at least seems like it is (the majority anyways).  Is that a bad thing????  I’m sure I would be fine.  But going there means that I’m going there for a reason, THE reason.  I do a lot, whatever I can, to avoid the topic.  I would have gone for the kids though because they seem to have a number of discussions about the impact on them.  But plane tickets are $600 … yikes!

Oh yeah, this new book I’m reading (or just started reading).  Cross, by James Patterson.  A few dozen pages in and the character Alex and his wife Maria are madly in love.  Their relationship seemed to resemble what Cari and I had.  Then Alex goes to pick up Maria from work and Maria is shot and dies.  I just skipped the rest of that chapter.  Damn!!!

We would do anything we could to calm the kids while driving.  Cari would ride next to me and would often find herself facing backwards in the front seat tending to the kids in the back.  Either that or we would take turns attempting to rock the carseat to calm him/her down.  Or we would sing to them.  But thinking back, maybe we were just singing in an attempt to drown out the screaming.  I think it was all an effort to help us pass the time and keep some sense of sanity.  Now, instead of singing to calm the kids I sing with them (well at least one of them and that’s when she allows me to sing).  We play the same cd’s over and over and we’ve memorized many of the songs.  She’ll tell me that this song is a girl song or this song is a boy song and she lets me know when it’s okay to sing or sing along with her.  From time to time I find myself driving in the car for minutes/miles without the kids yet still have those cd’s playing on the radio…yikes!  Anyways, she sings to some of the songs and sometimes asks me to sing along.  Most of the songs, by the way, refer to mommy.  What’s up with that???  Cari and I never used to sing with the songs.  We would just sing songs like old mcdonald, row row row your boat, itsy bitsy spider, etc.  There’s one song I CANNOT bring myself to sing, the wheels on the bus.  It’s silly.  It’s just a song.  But Cari and I would make a game out of it in an effort to just get through those tense times in the car with screaming kids.  It was one of those times where it was just the two of us.  It was us doing what we had to to make each other laugh just to get through a few difficult minutes.

My darling princess is beginning to profess her independence.  She’s challenging my parenting skills; skills that I’m pretty much making up as I go.  I love her unconditionally though.  I cannot expect things to always be easy, I just wish they were.  Tonight I read her one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.  The book is at least 10 pages too long.  I would usually read the whole thing to her but then later complain about how long it was.  One day I learned that Cari would skip half the pages.  Some of those books are way too long and it takes a lot of patience to get through those reads.  Usually it was my job, at the request of our daughter, to read her books before bed.  We would sit in her rocking chair and read two or three.  The rocking chair has since moved to my brothers house and a full size bed now takes up about half her room.  So tonight, and most other nights, we lay in her bed and I read some books to her.  Tonight she wanted to ask questions about the crazy characters in that book.  So not only do I have to read the whole thing, because she often knows when I skip a page, but now I have to answer questions?!?!?!  So that made me think of Cari and how she would skip a good portion of those types of books.  How would she handle answering questions about it too?  She probably would have put me in charge of reading.

Oh, and there’s this fly in the room that I cannot kill and it’s driving me insane.  The thing keeps buzzing around and won’t sit still for a second.

We’ve seen more butterflies this summer than ever before.  I swear I see one every day and even though I haven’t kept count I’m sure I’ve seen more than 100.

At the beach a little over a month ago we saw the most beautiful yellow one.  And my mom told me yesterday that she saw a similar one in her backyard.  Just this past Friday one landed right in front of Carson.  They are always at my house and at her families house.  And then this past Saturday …

One landed right on my head.  A few minutes earlier it landed on my shoulder but my friend, who thought it was really random that a butterfly would land on someone, wasn’t prepared to take a picture. 

There just seems to be a little something special about these butterflies.  Maybe, maybe not, but there’s just something about them.  We think it’s Cari.  Someone, one of her sisters I think, told my daughter that each time she sees a butterfly that it’s Mommy.  And ever since then we’ve seen butterflies everywhere.  And then for one to land on me the other day … okay, sure it’s possible that it could just randomly happen like that … but still.

It makes me think of that one day last year.  Shortly after the accident, some family and I drove to my house before going into the neighboring town to pass out fliers for a town safety meeting (which was a result of her death).  We drove up to our house. The radio station her cousin had on was playing our wedding song.  Then, up above the car, in the tree in front of our house, was a single solid white dove.  I’ve never seen a white dove before and haven’t seen one since.  

So the dove, and these butterflies … well, I’ll take what I can get. 

I have pictures of her and I everywhere in the house.  And every day I pass by this one picture of Cari from our son’s baptism (which only happened a few weeks before we lost her).  I still cannot believe this is real.  I stare at that picture every day and think how impossible it is that this is completely real.

And then, while I was working on the computer on the patio today … another butterfly

It’s been a while since I had a dream about her.  It finally happened again this morning although I cannot remember the context. 🙁  At least it happened. 

Last night was the first time in more than a month that we were back in our house for the night.  It’s taken that long to recover from surgery.  The 2nd floor is so hot though.  Normally its bearable but it’s been so hot out lately.  The 2nd floor used to be the attic I’m pretty sure whomever did the addition failed to put in proper ventilation.  So it get’s pretty hot up there even with the AC on.

Anyways, whether it was the heat or just being in the house with the kids, I’m glad it happened.