Birthday Weekend Day #2

Dear Carter, I'll be honest in saying that when I woke up on your birthday, I did NOT want to get out of bed. I hadn't really had a day like that yet, so I guess it's ok. I finally said a little prayer, read a little out of my bible, and got myself out of bed. The night before, Mikey finally had a bit of a breakdown because he misses his baby brother so much. He really hadn't shown much emotion about it since you left, so it was kind of unexpected. We were told by the child psychologists at the hospital to expect this kind of thing from him about a year after you passed away, and I'm amazed at how spot on they were. I think that he's feeling a bit better since we had a long talk, but it just made it a little harder on your mommy to be missing one of her sons and seeing the other one hurting. I think it was really good for Mikey to talk about these feelings, and am so glad that he felt comfortable enough to talk to me about it. We decided that today would be a good day to plant our flowers for the year. We're going to try growing them from seed this year. We even planted a special plant named after you! Afterward, we headed out to Chuck E. Cheese to celebrate your birthday. I think it was a really good idea to do something fun on your day rather than stay holed up in our house. Your brother and sister had a really good time! The next part of your birthday was visiting your grave to sing Happy Birthday to you. It's an understatement to say that your grave stood out on your birthday!

Daddy even found you a rock with a butterfly on it that read "Peace". Later that afternoon, our sweet friends, The Travis and The Daltons brought over a cake to celebrate Carter (our friends The Mitchells were there in spirit!) The cake was adorably perfect! It had butterflies at each corner! Loved it!

After the cake, we called it a very early night. We made it through sweet baby boy, but it wasn't without a lot of tears and missing you! Love you and Happy Birthday!!