Three months

I did go to the cemetary this morning. I ended up taking Lydia with me. We sang Kum Ba Yah and put some fake flowers in the ground and a hanging planter (which I had to make since I couldn't find one in the store this time of year) on a post. The temporary marker still was not there which made me sad but we'll get that taken care of and now that we have some flowers there it won't look like we are neglecting our child....I mean of course his grave but in a way it felt like we were neglecting him.

We are almost ready to order the permanent marker. Going to look at one more draft and then decide. Because we are having a Bible verse engraved on the stone (and not just the reference) the costs are more than we were expecting but as a friend pointed out to me, this is one way you can spend money on Joshua since we obviously didn't and won't have many things to buy "for him" as we do our other children.

Since I've been so busy lately I'm looking forward to the women's retreat this weekend to have some time to grieve and process. I think about Joshua every day and recount his birth and life on most days. But I don't really feel like I'm doing anything intention to heal. I don't want to get the point when I don't think about Joshua and his birth on a daily basis. So I guess what I want is to "heal" from is just the bad feelings I have associated with his existence/birth - like the fact that I can only fit into a small percentage of my pants and skirts and I don't want to be seen in maternity clothes and so I got really upset when the only pair of jeans I have that fit ripped. Losing weight would alleviate this problem but would it really fix it? It's sort of like that things that didn't have so much of an emotional component to them now are big emotional deals when you are grieving. I've also seen this with my feelings about not wasting things. It used to just annoy me when I or someone else in my house wasted something but now it's a big emotional deal. Somehow maybe I'm tying the thing to Joshua and since I don't want his existence to be wasted I don't want other things to be wasted. If Joshua's life has a purpose then so does everything else. So maybe part of healing is untying my loss of Joshua from these other things in life.