Yesterday felt a little surreal as Colton began his 2^nd year at Wichita Area Technical College and Keely started her first day as a freshman at Wichita State University. While I am excited for both of them, it still doesn’t feel quite right not to be making a sack lunch for DD and reminding him to stay out of trouble. If Dalton were here, his first day as a sophomore at Collegiate wouldn’t be for a little while longer. Yet the new school year jitters were in full effect. I wonder how many more Augusts I will feel like this.

The home stretch of my pregnancy is upon us. We have nine weeks until our baby girl will be here. I spent the last couple months feeling excited. Now I sense my emotions turning more towards nervousness as we near the end. She is really coming. Fifteen years after doing it for what I thought was the last time, here I am about to start over. At forty years old. I wonder if the delivery will be like the others. I fantasize if she will have Dalton and Keely’s eyes or Colton’s curls. What scares me the most is what I fought after each of my children’s births. Horrible post-partum depression. Couple post-partum depression with a person who has already lost a child and it sounds like a recipe for disaster. A perfect storm of sorts. I never understood how depression can attack a person like myself who has a naturally happy disposition, but I guess it doesn’t play fair. Anyone can be a victim to it at any time. Throw in pregnancy hormones and depression seems to soar to a whole different dimension.

I know I haven’t blogged for a couple months. Things always seem so much busier in the summer. Although, lately, I have found I’m trying to settle down more. For me that basically means more reading, walking, napping (better enjoy that now I know) and less TV watching and social media scrolling. I am sick of the election already. I feel like I did my part and bought a few “Hillary for Prison 2016” signs from Amazon and stuck them out by the highway. Now I’m done. The media is so biased I can barely stomach my newsfeed on Facebook. Speaking of the media, a few recent news stories have completely turned my stomach. Yesterday I noticed about three or four news outlets report on the “new details” that have emerged regarding the little boy in Florida who died from an alligator attack. Apparently these news stations feel like it is our business to now know that the little boy was bit in the head by the alligator as he was taken underwater. Immediately in my mind, I equated that piece of information with how it would have been none of the public’s business to know the details of my own son’s death. What I would have felt if the information detailing how fractured Dalton’s skull was after his accident had been made public months after the fact. Or take the little boy who died on the waterslide in Kansas City. I tortured myself by reading thread after thread from “keyboard warriors” who argued back and forth with complete strangers over how they interpreted the term “decapitation” to mean. People probably hundreds of miles away from one another spoke of their “credentials and personal knowledge of decapitation” and offered what they felt was the most likely way the 10 year old boy had his head severed while riding the world’s tallest water slide. Meanwhile, they are totally oblivious to a family left to grieve over a loss they couldn’t ever imagine unless experiencing the horror personally.

I actually don’t believe most people even realize what they are saying and doing that feels so insensitive to those of us who have walked this journey of losing a child. If you only get one thing from reading my blogs, I would hope it would be to raise awareness to what you say and how you say it. Don’t think I’m all caught up in political correctness, because I assure you I am not. No one should walk on eggshells around us. Yet you can be cautious in tongue. Last Friday is a good example. I called the business Frontgate to order my Ridgebacks a couple of ridiculously large, plush dog beds. After several minutes of chit-chat with the sales associate, she started telling me about the dog she had to put down last year. I guess her dog was her everything. Went with her everywhere. At 11 years old, she had to put her precious dog down. Describing it to me, she went on to say that “putting down her dog was just like losing a child.” Little did she know she was talking to someone who had actually lost a child. I politely finished up my order with her and hung up the phone. I didn’t feel sad. I felt pissed. I felt pissed that a person can equate losing an animal with losing a human being. Maybe I once said something like that before Dalton died… I don’t know. And let me preface what I’m about to say with first sharing that there is no dog owner in this world more in love with her dogs than me. I literally have 3 shadows with me everywhere I go, inside and outside of my home. However, never ever fool yourself into thinking that their life is equal to the life of a child. No animal’s life is. And, yes, that includes Harambe and the safari animals America is so obsessed to protect when a hunter legally shoots and kills them. Please, please think of this blog the next time you feel the urge to share that losing your pet is just like losing a child. It most certainly is not.

Enough negativity. I don’t write these to share pessimism with you all. In fact, I write because I want to offer the message of hope. There certainly is hope after tragedy. And we are nine weeks away from having our little miracle of hope arrive. She will not replace what we have lost in any way. Nobody could ever do that. Instead, she will bring light into darkness. Hope to the hopeless. And good out of evil. We have picked out her name. Originally, when we “assumed” God would give us another son, we were set on the name Dawson. It means “son of David.” After learning we were having a baby girl, we couldn’t stop thinking of our boy name. Adapting the name to be more feminine, we settled on Dawsyn. She can be a “daughter of David.” Struggling for months on a middle name, Troy chose one recently. I was sick of giving him suggestions, so I was up for about anything. Out of the blue one day, he sent me an email. The subject line said one word. Faith. I opened it and read what he had to say. He was sitting at work and suddenly realized that her middle name had to be Faith. It was faith that had led us to this point. Our trust in God’s plan for us had never wavered since Dalton’s accident. Our faith was rewarded the day we found out we were about to be parents for the fourth time. We are proud to announce that Dawsyn Faith will be here very, very soon.

“And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who are called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28)