Feelin Cute, Might Delete Later

Well, Happy New Years! I cannot believe it's 2024!

We had a nice Christmas at home. After having a really hard Christmas Eve, I let my emotions run out and just let myself be. I let myself cry and just tried to remember that I don't need to hide it, especially at home. Adam's sister, Courtney spent the night Christmas Eve and my niece Ella came over Christmas morning. We had presents to open and I made lasagna for dinner.

I think Millie loves the Christmas tree as much as her big brother did too ❤️ she's been hiding her toys under the tree skirt.

Now that presents are opened, here are some crafts I made this year! I took Adam's mom's handwriting and made hot pads with it for Courtney. Millie has been extra snuggly lately - I think she can tell I've been feeling down. Courtney and I also got our nails done - I really like how they turned out!

For New Year's, my father-in-law and his fiancé came to spend the weekend with us! They came down Friday and we spent the night playing games and they were working on teaching me Euchre. Saturday we had dinner at Rustique, a delicious pizza place and went to a Green Bay Gamblers game after! They played team USA and it was an exciting hockey game! Afterwards we went back and played more card games. Sunday we hung around the house. We had appetizers, watched the Packer game, then more cards while we waited for the ball to drop.

Monday we watched Michigan win and took lots of naps!

New Years was better for my grief than Christmas, but I still had a hard time after cheers-ing to a New Year.. it just reminds me it's another year without my son. Another year further from the last time I held him in my arms. I hate that time just continues without him here. Life keeps marching on even though my entire world stopped that day. I still feel like I have a hole in my chest most days. I feel empty. It's not a numb feeling - I feel everything.. but I feel like my chest is just empty.

I was listening to Spotify while I was getting ready for work this morning and a Luke Combs song came in and it made think about our situation.

"I guess whoever said the grass is greener

Must have never seen the other side

What don't kill you makes you stronger

Sure sounds like a lie

And whoever said that time heals everything

And everything will be alright?

Whoever said it ain't the end of the world

You can find somebody new

Must've never met you"

It's definitely about a woman in his song, but it fits Greyson for me. I hate the cliche sayings. "everything happens for a reason" "time heals all wounds" "God needed another angel " "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.".. they're all bullshit. They don't actually make you feel better and the song was so true. Time doesn't heal anything.. time just allows you to learn how to live with your grief. It's still there.. and it's always going to be there. Time just continues, the world keep spinning, life moves on.. even though you might feel stuck. To be very honest, I feel like the time since Greyson passed has been a big blur. I've been in a brain fog and some days it clears up but most days it's still there.

I am currently working on losing weight so that we can start IVF as soon as possible. They want your BMI under a certain number and I'm a little bit over. I'll be honest, I've always struggled with my weight and I honestly let everything go once we had Greyson's diagnosis. I tried here and there to eat healthy and workout.. I've been taking Millie for walks and trying to get more steps every day, but not consistently enough. I've lost weight since last year but I need to lose more. I haven't shared too much of our IVF journey because we are waiting on me. They finished our genetic probe in December. The probe will be used to test the embryos for our specific Tay-Sachs mutation so we will know before implantation. We have discussed it together and we will not be moving forward with any embryos that test positive for Tay-Sachs. We would love any child that we are given with our entire heart, but our hearts cannot take watching another baby go through this disease. We can't. We are still so broken from Greyson's journey, we just can't do it again. It's too much heartbreak. Losing weight is always a goal, especially at the start of a new year, but man, having kids is a wonderful motivation.

We are still on break from school for another couple weeks and I'm trying to enjoy it. I am reading a book (for fun!) and I am even getting started studying to try and get ahead a little bit. Adam is a year ahead of me so he has a lot of his material still. I used to save all my stuff too but decided to get rid of it. We were keeping things from classes we both already passed. I looked at my remaining classes and I have 14 classes left. I'm in the part-time track so I won't be done until Spring 2026, but I don't think I could do full time classes, work part time, and hopefully be pregnant/have an infant all at the same time. Part time is fine.

I need to still figure out what happened with some of my previous blog posts- some of my photos I uploaded disappeared when I upgrade the blog site and I need to work through them to replace but I just haven't done it yet. So instead, I'll upload these and I'm going to head into Greyson's room to read my book and snuggle Millie. We can work on the photos another day :)

xoxo,

Kim