Emma's Pond

Each year the Utah Foster Care Foundation hosts a Chalk Art Festival up in Salt Lake. I had never heard of it before until my friend Camille told me about it. Some of you may remember her, she hosted one of our giveaways with a name drawing. You can check out her work here or here. As you can see, she is an amazing artist!

She has participated in the Chalk Art Festival for a few years now and this year she contacted me and asked if it would be okay if she did a little tribute to Emma. She called it "Emma's Pond." I was touched that she would think of doing this for us. Unfortunately, the festival was Friday and Saturday and I was camping all last week and didn't get home until midnight on Friday and then it was raining all day Saturday so I never went up to Salt Lake to see it. But Camille posted pictures on her blogs. So check out Emma's pond here and here.

A big thank you to Camille and all those who were working with her!

A picture of the artists:

The finished work:

We're Scrapbooking Again!!!!

WHEN: Thursday, June 11th from 6 to 9 p.m. Come whenever you can during that time period and just get as much done as you can!

WHERE: Church building located at 1555 North 1350 West, Provo, Utah

WHO: Anyone who can! You don’t need to be super creative (although you can be) to be of help. Feel free to invite family and friends to join you!

WHAT TO BRING: The most crucial supplies to bring will be scissors and adhesives. We will have some there, but if we have a good turn-out, you will have to take turns using these items. Also, if you have any old scrapbook supplies you wish to donate or that you wish to use, feel free to bring these and share them with others.

We're continuing to chug along with these scrapbooks, but there's still lots to do! A big thank you to all who came last time and who have worked on some on their own time! You guys are the best!

Hope to see you there!

P.S. For those who were able to come last time - do you have any suggestions for a better way to organize all of the paper and embellishments? I feel like everything was just scattered about and a lot of stuff got neglected because it was buried. The only thing I can think of is to start with more tables to begin with, but then I'm afraid it'll feel weird to have tables full of stuff surrounding you. Does that make sense? Anyways, any suggestions?

P.P.S. Feel free to bring kiddos along. I brought my boys last time and a couple of other people did as well and they all played together with my husband (love ya Husband!).

P.P.P.S. Will snacks entice you to come?

What To Do

I've been thinking a lot lately about what I should do with this blog. As I've said before and as some of you know, I have a private family blog that I've had for many years. I started this blog mainly because I thought it would be too difficult to blog about Emma and about the fun times we were having with our boys right next to each other. However, as time went on, we found great joy in Emma and I didn't feel like it was a weird thing to blog those things together. But at that point, I had already started this blog. Not only that, but this blog had reached across the country and even to various parts of the world and I was very grateful that Emma's story was being shared and appreciated by so many.

Now it's been almost 5 months since Emma has left us. Wow. Sometimes I wish time would stop and the world would remember our sweet little girl. While we shall never forget Emma, the world moves on without her. We now face the awkward question of "how many children do you have?" While I don't like to make others uneasy, I do like to mention Emma because I don't want her to be left behind.

Having said all that, I'm not quite sure what to do with this blog now. I would love to continue to share Emma's story with the world, but Emma's story is the story of our family moving and continuing on in this world and I blog about that in my other blog. I can continue to blog about ups and downs and I can continue to blog about the scrapbooks (because I still need help!) but I'm not sure of what else to blog.

I think for sure I'm going to take some time to get Emma's blog more user friendly. I realized that I've never put the links to all of the other anen mom's blogs up here and I would like to do that. If you're reading this and you are a blogger of a baby with anencephaly, please leave a comment with your blog address. I have them all in my google reader, but it would be so much quicker if the comments were just left. And if not, then I will just go through my google reader and do it. I think I'm also going to put up links to specific posts on the sidebar so that people who come to this page for the first time can get a better idea of some of the thoughts along the way. I'm also going to be publishing this blog into a book (probably through blurb) so that we can have that as part of our memories of Emma.

Congratulations

Congratulations to Emma!

You are going to be a big sister!