Samuel's 6th Birthday

We had a nice weekend remembering our sweet Samuel. Landon and I made cupcakes on Saturday. Landon picked out confetti cake mix and frosting with sprinkles. He loved helping make these and "helping" me by licking the beater clean :)

My sweet friend gave me a gift at church that morning and Landon asked if we could open it. I told him we would wait until we went to visit Samuel. Then, Landon said, "Are we going to heaven??" I said, "No, we're just going to where Samuel's body is buried." These things are so hard for a four year old to understand. It was heartbreaking to see how excited he was to meet his brother. One day...

When we opened the present, this is what we found... Little figurines of our whole family! It is so sweet to see what our family really looks like. From the left: Olivia wearing a tutu (she was thrilled with this!), Samuel holding 6 balloons, Daddy, Mommy wearing my Samuel necklace, Landon because blue's his favorite color, and James because the James on Thomas is red ;) Landon and Olivia kept insisting that James lay down since he can't walk yet :)

Then, we went to Steak N' Shake, our family tradition.  It was a sweet time.

After supper, we came home and sang happy birthday to Samuel and had cupcakes.

There's a helium shortage, so we weren't able to let balloons off on Samuel's birthday, but we did the next day. It was so windy....

 ...and I'm sad to say that the balloons got stuck in our neighbor's tree. This really upset me at first and I couldn't pin point why. I guess I just wanted everything to go perfectly for his birthday. When I thought about this later, I realized that life doesn't go perfectly with our other kiddos, and he is just as much our kid as they are, it's not practical to expect things to be perfect and that's ok.

The pregnancy loss support group I help out with had a balloon release the night after his birthday as well, so I got to send a balloon up then too.

We miss our sweet firstborn so much and celebrate his being in heaven the only way we know how. Can't wait to join him one day on those streets of gold, but until that day, His mercies are new every morning - great is His faithfulness.