October 15th: Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day

 I'll be honest, I had no idea that there was a day dedicated to remembering babies lost as infants or in the womb.  The only reason I know is from all the pinteresting I did right after losing our baby boy.  Yes, we found out our baby was a boy through the genetic testing.  That's the only answer we got.  So now, I want to raise awareness about Pregnancy and Infant loss.

October is Miscarriage and baby loss awareness month.  October seems to be the awareness month for everything, but everything gets overshadowed by Breast Cancer awareness - which is also a very necessary awareness.  But everyone I've talked to had no idea that there was an awareness month, a remembrance day, or even a ribbon for miscarriage!  I've done my best to raise awareness because I want people to know.  I don't want having a miscarriage to be taboo anymore. Like there was something wrong with me that caused a miscarriage or that I couldn't keep my baby.  I definitely had those thoughts in the days following the miscarriage, but I now know there was nothing I could have done.  Something happened, and God has his own plan.  This wasn't the baby He wants us to have.  There were lessons He wanted us to learn from this as well.  But having a taboo around miscarriage does not help those feelings.  Miscarriage happens to 1 in 4 pregnancies.  That's a REALLY high percentage.  And yet people don't know about this day?  That's a much higher percentage than who encounters breast cancer.

October 15th is Remembrance day.  This is the day where everyone who has lost a baby remembers their lost ones.  It is asked for a wave of light.  If everyone around the world lights a candle at 7pm, there will be a continuous wave of light for 24 hours for our lost babies.  I'm raising awareness for this. We will be participating tonight.  And I ask anyone who has experienced the loss of a baby to also participate.  Together we can bring awareness.  My in-laws and my parents are both lighting a candle for our baby boy also.

We will never forget the baby boy we never got to hold or kiss.  Even though life will move on and we will try to start our family again, we will never forget this baby.  And those future babies will never replace the baby we lost.  Please light a candle at 7pm tonight.

30th Birthday Celebration!

This weekend we celebrated my husband's 30th birthday!  I can't believe he's that old!  We wanted to have a special party to celebrate him and all he's done in his 30 years.

We invited all our family and friends.  I created invitations based on an idea I saw on Pinterest.  Brandon loves grilling and has always wanted to have a BBQ party.  So we decided to go with that.  He wanted to cook a bunch of food for everyone.  I used powerpoint to create the design using text boxes.  I put a BBQ clipart in the background and changed the colors and transparency to give a little extra something for your eye when looking at it.

Brandon made the food (which I unfortunately do not have a picture of), and I made pumpkin cupcakes.  I ended up using boxed cupcake mix because the grocery store didn't have all the ingredients I needed for the recipe I wanted.  But I made the pumpkin spice frosting from scratch using a recipe I also found on pinterest.  It wasn't nearly as thick and firm as I wanted. I had wanted to make a pretty design with it, but the frosting was too thin and just fell.  So we went with it and made it look as nice as we could.  But the frosting was perfect.  I created printables for the cupcake toppers using Word.  I printed them out, cut them, and glued them on to the tootpicks.  It was a lot of work, but I think they turned out great and the cupcakes were a hit!

I created a menu on a chalkboard.  Nothing super extragent.  Just something so everyone knew what food was here, and I really like chalkboards.  We hung it in the kitchen near all the food.

 
I wanted to celebrate with some pictures throughout Brandon's 30 years.  I had seen an idea on pinterest (shocker!) about creating the number using the pictures.  It ended up turning out really great.  I had pictures from when he was a baby through today.  It was a lot of fun to reminisce about all the things we've done.  He's had a pretty good life.  It was a lot of fun for everyone to go through all the pictures.  The many facial hair styles of Brandon Ray.  Haha.

No party is complete without balloons!  We had to buy a helium tank to make the balloons float.  I used yard staples that we had to place them in the ground and I tied balloons to them to line the walkway as everyone walked up.  We also tied them throughout the house and some in the backyard where everyone hung out.

And finally a sign for everyone to sign wishing Brandon another happy 30 years.

The party was a success.  I had so much fun planning it and getting it ready.  Thank goodness I had friends staying with me who really helped me out to get everything set up before people started arriving!  Thank you to everyone who came out to celebrate Brandon's 30th!  I love him so much, and don't know what I would do without him.  Looking forward to the next 30 years.