My saving grace

Things have been rough lately. Everything's seemed hard and discouraging and the hubby's been irritating (as opposed to me being irritating, I'm sure - lol) and I've just been feeling really overwhelmed and really stressed and really ready to throw in the proverbial towel. Today I'd had it so Mia and I went for a drive and where we ended up there was a PetSmart. Mia loves dogs so I figured it would be a fun thing to go and walk through the pet store and look at and talk about all the animals. She got the biggest kick out of the dogs that the owners had brought into the store with them. She starts "ooh"-ing and giggling and gets so excited. She also enjoyed the birds because there was so much movement in the cages. I wish I'd have gotten a video of her with this one lady's Jack Russel terrier, but I WAS able to get this one of her by the fishes but every time I try to upload it, it shuts down my browser! Just my rotten luck. Sigh...

Guess we'll have to go with photos instead, and goodness knows, I've got plenty of those!  :)  Last weekend we went to a UT (no, not Utah, but University of Texas, for all my Utah family who might be confused by that) tailgate. It just so happens they were playing BYU which is a Utah team.  lol  Thus, Mia wore her UT Longhorn orange.  I sent this photo to my best buddy up in Utah who is a BYU fanatic with the following captioning.

Lord, please let my Longhorns beat Uncle Iain's Cougars.  lol

 

Watching the game and excitedly clapping along with the excited spectators - Mia gets really excited when other people clap and cheer and always has to join in.

Earlier that day we'd gone to a Cleft Seminar near Dell Children's Hospital. I'd been looking all over for some cleft themed shirts and just haven't found any that I liked, so a week or so before the seminar I decided to make my own!  :)  Needless to say, I played with some different designs on the computer - I knew what I wanted it to look like, but it was tricky getting it to look like it wasn't drawn by a five year old. I asked the hubby if he minded if we all wore shirts that were the same, and he wondered if I could tweak something so that they weren't all EXACTLY the same. So, last minute I made a change to the color of the hearts for each of our shirts. Then Zeus said, well can mine be in Spanish? Luckily he got his request in before they were printed and already made. I finally got it all figured out and was finally ironing away like crazy at midnight the night before the seminar conference.  lol 

Unfortunately Mia was way overdue for her nap by the time we got home, so she went down for her nap before we thought to get a group shot. Luckily we'd gotten some of her before and after in her shirt.  :)

I made this shirt for a mommy I've messaged back and forth with a few times on my babycenter.com cleft group who just had a baby girl with a unilateral cleft lip. Since her baby's so new, she didn't make it to the seminar, but she saw the photo of it that I posted on the group and sent me the sweetest text about how she'd seen the post and it'd made her cry and she copied the photo of it to her facebook and it'd made all her lady friends cry, which in turn made ME almost cry.  :)  

I SO wished I'd have had onesies like this to put Mia when she was brand new and prior to her lip surgery. I would have had her wear a different color or design every day!  :)  When you have a baby that's born with something that's a deviation from the norm (I hate the word birth defect, because my beautiful, spunky little girl is in NO way defective), you want other people to see the beauty that you see in them. You want to shield them from all the ugliness in the world, but you don't want to hide them or have others think you are embarrassed of them, because you aren't!  I'd love to be able to give every new-born baby one of these onesies. 

I've gotten some great feedback from them, so I think I'm going to start a mini-small business and make these to share. My hope is to be able to get it all worked out so that I can donate part of each purchase to http://www.smiletrain.org/ to help pay for cleft surgeries. Anyhow, that's the plan.

My old computer is having trouble uploading more photos right now, so I guess that's it for tonight.