Here Comes Peter Cotton Tail...

So last week we made a trip to visit the local Easter Bunny. I am happy to report that it went WAY better than the 2012 Christmas disaster that was visiting Santa, although the Easter Bunny doesn't really have a lot to do.  I mean, he doesn't like, talk to the kids or anything.  He just sits there looking kinda creepy.  I think as parents we should start some kind of petition to get all Easter Bunny companies to buy new outfits that look like the Bunny in the Rise of the Guardians.  Wouldn't that be awesome?  And SO MUCH COOLER? But alas, our EB just looked like every other big white Bunny across the nation.  Something like this:

Okay, he looks a little afraid, but who can blame him. I am just proud he sat with him!

Not to mention that he actually talked with him and explained his need for candy. What a big boy!

Cici was with us, but she was not up for sitting with the giant bunny.  I can't really blame her.  She was up for sitting with the REAL bunnies, which is the entire reason we go to this place for our Easter Bunny Shots.

How great are these?

 "Mama, why do we even mess with the big one in the creepy costume?  Lets just stick with this!"


No fear here, only love

Henry is thinking "He will be mine"*

Which... no he totally wont. But we can come see him again next Easter!

You can see all the other times Henry has hung out with the bunnies here, here and here. ( Good thing I blog.  Otherwise I would have no idea where these pictures were)

 

She is Everywhere

I randomly click on a  youtube video about the Disney princess parody, and I go from entertained to wiping away tears, because as I watched I thought "I have to show this to Missy..."

***************

We drive down the road and see a car that looks like hers, and Henry shouts "THERE'S AUNT MIMI!  SHE ISN'T IN HEAVEN! She is RIGHT THERE!"
***************

Boo walks into the farm and sees her shoes by the door, which mom is now wearing.  Boo sees them and thinks "OH MISSY'S..."  She said she didn't get all the way to "here" before she remembered... but for a moment, just an instant, she was so happy.
**************

Henry was on his way to swim lessons with Aunt Boo when he asks "Aunt Boo, will Mimi be at swim class?"  Boo asked him what he thought and he said "No... Aunt Mimi died so she wont be there."  He was quiet for a second, then said "Caterpillar is really sad".
**************

We celebrated Easter with my parents on Sunday.  When we gathered around to pray, my dad said "Is everyone here?" with this confusion in his voice, because this can't be everyone, can it?  Then he simply said "It just doesn't feel like it."

*************

We finished packing her apartment last week.  The movers arrived on Saturday, and just like that, Missy no longer had her own little apartment downtown.  A few things went into storage, but most of her beloved items found new homes with those who loved her most.  Everywhere I look at my house, now I see Missy.  The bread box, the wooden chest, the green glass pitcher or the table and chair on our front porch; the pair of TOMS or the little teal cardigan.  She is everywhere, she is always with us, and yet it is not enough.  I feel her presence, and at the exact same time I constantly feel her absence.  And in a way, it feels so wrong to have her things at my house, because I so desperately want her here to need them.  I want her to walk in and ask for them back.

Since I know she can't, we will surround ourselves with her things; we will think of her when we look at them, but we are already thinking of her all the time anyway, so that won't be anything new.

A few of Missy's sweet things, which found a home in my kitchen


 

A Bridal Shower Slumber Party (Because that is totally a thing now)

So Nick's cousin Kelsey is getting married in May. Actually, what is the etiquette on calling her my cousin? Is she ever my cousin?  I mean, I have known her since she was (counts up years) seven years old. (freaks out a little because HOW IS SHE GETTING MARRIED?!?! I AM OLD) and I FEEL like she is my cousin, but I find it a little confusing if I call her my cousin, so I continue to go with "Nick's cousin".  But then one day I got reprimanded by her brother for referring to him as Nick's cousin, because like, aren't we close enough to just be cousins by now?? Which....I have no idea... is that how it works?.... thoughts?  Do you all call your extended in-laws your aunt/uncle/cousin since you can't call them your cousin-in-law?

Wow.  Really off topic there.  Let's start over.

So cousin Kelsey is getting married!
 
The sweet Bride and her Mama 

And since we are so excited about her big day, her Aunt Sally (aka Nana to us) wanted to host her a Kentucky shower so we could celebrate!

My cleaver sister in law thought it might be fun to do it as a sleep over at my mother in laws house.  Maybe so we could enjoy more time together, maybe so we could drink... hard to say which one was more of an idea motivator


Candice enjoying wine out of out of a Mickey Mouse glass... I feel confident my MIL has wine glasses, but Candice clearly wanted to keep it classy

 I was all about this sleep over idea right up until it was time to leave our house, which was when I remembered that I am sorta a hermit right now and being around people scares me.  Lucky for me, once I got there I remembered how much I love these ladies, and how lucky I am to be a part of their family.  They are so amazing and supportive of me and all I am going through, I feel blessed to have them.

Three generations of Baugh ladies

The third generation (including the grandsons gals... obviously)


My mother in law made these adorable favors, because she is awesome. And she cooked a great dinner (and breakfast!), further supporting the previous claim of awesomeness.

The night was full of so many enjoyable things.


We did bridal shower stuff like this
 
We played games like this*

which were possibly made more enjoyable by this
 
We ate things like this
 
 had moments like this...

and this...

and this.

We stayed up late laughing and talking and giving Kelsey all kinds of advice she really doesn't need because her and Thomas are already amazing, and will do excellent at this entire married life deal.

So all around, it was a pretty awesome idea. Great job Sally on hosting it! Great job Candice on thinking of having it be a sleep over.  Great job Nicole on the games.  Great job Kelsey on getting married so we had a reason to celebrate!

* I feel as if I should include more pictures from the toilet paper wedding dress game. Because they make me laugh. So we had five minutes, and there was one model and three dress makers on each team...

Blair getting the top of her dress made. We went with a halter design
 
Candice, clearly enjoying her bridal fitting

 I would say we are three minutes in. Things are coming together on our team... (we have Brenda and Mawmaw, these two know how to make a toilet paper dress!). Also, my shirt.. I am not loving it's billowing nature in these pictures...

 
Four minutes in, they seem to believe they need more time...
 
But at five minutes we had had time to construct a veil, a train, and some nice floral accents... because apparently our team had excellent time management when toilet paper wedding dress constructing

But their team DID have time to put a beautiful toilet paper bow in her hair! Doesn't she look like she feels pretty??

 
Kelsey was the judge... I can't remember who won... I don't think it was important.

(It totally is important and it was us)

Happy Bridal Shower, Kelsey!  We can't wait for the wedding!

Welcome to my Violence Against Women Soap Box

Did you know that one in three women are assaulted during their four years on a college campus.  1 in 3.

I am just going to let that sink in.

Our sisters, our daughters, ourselves. ONE in THREE.

Most of those assaults were not done in back allies by strangers.  They are not the violent acts we see  in movies or on the news, supposedly preventable by mace and rape whistles.  They are exactly, EXACTLY what we are seeing play out in the news from Steubenville, Ohio.  The only difference is that all these girls, these one in three, wake up confused and unsure or embarrassed of what happened to them, and their attacker was a person not stupid enough to take pictures and send social media blasts about how funny it is to "be raping a dead girl".

I know people want to feel bad for the boys as they sob about their lives being over after the verdict.  As they beg for forgiveness. It reminds me of someone we know who killed a person while driving drunk.  This wasn't a bad guy, but he made a hell of a bad decision.  When your terrible decisions dramatically effect the path of another persons life, then you must be held accountable for them.  Are these two guys sexual predators or were they caught up in a crazy night and did something completely stupid?  Time will tell, but for now it doesn't matter.  If it was their first time or their 20th time, they did this. They dramatically effected the path of her life, and there are consequences for these actions.  One year, two years, 100 days in jail.  Registering as a sex offender.   These are the consequences.

The fact that she was drunk doesn't matter.  Would people feel different if they sexually assaulted a drunk boy in front of people?  Would they?  If one of their fellow players was blackout drunk, and they did these same things to him, would we say that they were just boys being boys? That the blacked out kid couldn't say no, so maybe he wanted it?  Do people really think she wanted THIS?  Her naked in the middle of a room, completely unaware while they joke and sexually assault her for the crowd?  Really?

My practicum for my masters was with the violence prevention research team here at UK.  We worked with the Green Dot team, which is working to change the mentality of violence against women on college campuses.  The idea is that if a violent act is about to occur, it is not up to the girl to get herself out of it, it is not up to the perpetrator to realize he is wrong and stop, it is up to the bystanders to stand up and say "I AM NOT OKAY WITH THIS"

This is what failed to happen in Ohio. This is what fails to happen again and again on high school and college campuses around the nation. The Bystanders stand around and watch, feeling powerless to be the one to stand up and say "Look guys, I really feel like this is wrong".  And that's truly because the larger the group, the less likely a person is to stand up and complain. The more pressure everyone feels to go with the flow, to just assume that everyone else is okay with this, so it must be okay.

It's not okay.  It is never okay.  She was drinking, she was drunk, she.. what?  Deserved it?  How do we get there as a culture?  How do people make that jump.  Nobody deserves to be sexually assaulted.  Nobody is asking to be naked and taken advantage of in a crowd of people while blacked out.  And yet we see that victim blaming, even now.  CNN says "how sad for these boys with promising futures".  NBC news laments their promising football careers.  USA Today stresses again and again that she was drunk. 

We are victim blaming.  And if we want to break this pattern, we need to stand up together and say "I am not okay with this."

If one and three girls are assaulted, are one in three boys predators?  Of course not.  Studies show 2% of college campus men are predators, and yet 33% of college women are assaulted.  And those boys do this again and again and again. Let's stop blaming the victim and start prosecuting the attackers.  Let's be aware as bystanders to listen to the voice in our head that says "This doesn't feel right" and actually do something about it.  I am sure every person at that party now wishes they had stood up and said "this isn't right".

If you want to know more about the Green Dot program, which is amazing and inspirational and a complete rethinking on how to approach violence prevention in schools and across the nation, you can read more about it here.  

Sweet Child of Mine

He found this hat at Kohls.  He picked it up, looked at it and said "This hat will be mine."

No, really. I am not putting words in his mouth.  He didn't say he liked it, he didn't say he wanted it.  He simply said "This hat will be mine" and put it on.  He is so awesome sometimes, it kills me.

For the record, we didn't buy the hat because it was like, $35.  But now I have a Kohls coupon, and the boy needs a summer hat, right?  After looking at this picture, I am thinking the Easter Bunny might bring it.

A Big Boy Bedroom-Outer Space Style

A few months before Christmas Henry really started complaining that he no longer liked his bed. He would lay there and say "I just don't like it Mama, I just don't! What can we do? Let's think..." *taps finger on chin to show how hard he is working to solve this terrible problem*.  His answer was always that he could just sleep with us, but Nick and I figured we might be able to come up with a better solution.

What we came up with was that he just might be ready for a big boy room! My parents wanted to get his bed for Christmas, so over our holiday break we took on the big boy bedroom upgrade project.  Let's look at pictures, shall we?

Before-The Forest Nursery (which you can see in true nursery form here):


Toddler Bed, adorable lamp, raccoon and bird on the wall....man, I loved this nursery.


Kinda, sorta, a full room shot. The Room is really small, so it is hard to photograph.  Also, YES he has a few toys, and that IS a giant TMNT blimp half cut off on the top of the left bookshelf.  It was Nick's when he was little (of course it was) 

A close up of the 'Henry' on the wall.  So sweet and baby like!

 And now, AFTER:
 
BOOM! Welcome to SPACE. (Those posters on the wall are from Nick's room when he was in school (of course they are) and are pictures from the Hubble telescope.

Do you see that moon up in the top corner? It's a light, and it has all the moon phases. It was really the start of the entire space room idea, and it is awesome. I want my own.
 
More of Nick's space posters making the shelves look cool

Angry Bird space calendar and actual NASA space shuttle shirt which I got from my online friends who actually works at NASA (Nick has one too. Of course)
 

And finally a close up of Henry on the wall in his big boy outer space bedroom. I can't believe he is big enough to need a big boy room, but man he sure does love it.

Google Reader Panic

I realize I am a day late to this freak out party because yesterday was my day off, and the only think I heard about was the white smoke and all that Catholic chaos (which I find extremely interesting even though I am not Catholic). So I thought THAT was the big news of the day,   but low and behold, there was something much more crucial to my daily life going on.

Google announced that they are shutting down GOOGLE READER.

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS ALL ABOUT??**

Nothing has made me feel like I am holding on to a sinking ship with blogging as the idea that google no longer sees a point to run Reader because of low usage. LOW USAGE.  I use Google Reader EVERY FREAKING DAY (Except yesterday... apparently). And according to feedburner (run by GOOGLE) I have hundreds of followers through google reader.  HUNDREDS!  THAT ALMOST MAKES ME A BLOGGING CELEBRITY!! (no it doesn't)

So what's next? Will they shut down BLOGGER?  (also run by GOOGLE) WHERE WILL I PUT ALL MY PRECIOUS WOOOORDS if they shut down blogger??  Who will read my PRECIOUS WORDS if you all can't access them through Google Reader??

I am going to be THAT guy... the one still rocking the 8 tracks because he invested in them damn it, he IS NOT switching to cassette tapes.  WHAT A WASTE.  But for me it will be blogging I just can't quit.  I will still be sitting here, writing away, even when nobody reads anymore.  Because I love it!  And I refuse to believe that you all don't love it too!

So if you want to keep following our story, here are a few options for how to find me once Google abandons all the blogging faithful.

Click HERE to follow Bio Girl on Facebook.

Click HERE to follow me on Twitter, where I always link to new posts.

Click HERE to sign up for Feedly, from what I hear is a good alternative to Google Reader.

Click HERE for a list of other reader alternatives now that Google is leaving the game.

Or you can just keep coming here to good old biogirlblog.com . I will stick around.  I mean, I pay like $10 a year for this space.  I am going to make the most of it!

Mel over at Stirrup Queens has a great post about this exact same idea, but she managed to put it into words much better than I did. Check it out if you have time!

**I am working in some GIFs around here... because I can SOMETIMES change with the times, and I think tumblr sites like #BBN Problems and #TheClearlyDope are hilarious.  I mean, I don't do it right. I ADD THEM TO MY GOOGLE READER.  But still, I laugh. So I am giving them a try, but if you don't think they work for longer posts like this, just let me know. I might listen, I might not.
 

Spring Break

So hello.

Yeah, Friday was hard (really, really hard), if you couldn't tell from my post.  But Saturday rolled around, and it was so freaking beautiful around here it was impossible to stay that sad.  Also, I think I was emotionally drained from being that upset.  There was nowhere to go but up.

So we spent Saturday and Sunday outside.  We worked in the yard, played on the swing-set and grilled out dinner. Nick did some major reworking of some of the back landscaping, and I... I don't know. I watched.  And I pushed Henry on the swing.  That was something.  At one point Henry yelled from his swing to his Papa, "Hey Papa!  I LOVE my swing set!  Thank you for that!"  It was extremely rewarding.

Anyway, it was a great weekend.  we kept the doors open and the heat/air turned off.  It was nice to breath in the fresh air.

I also found out that I completely rocked my Biostats midterm, getting a 99%.  Because I am annoying, I want to know how I missed that 1%. (Also because I am annoying, I am bragging about how good I did on my midterm)  On Saturday I submitted my paper for my Rural Health class, so I am completely caught up and truly have a full week off of school.  It's great!

Now would normally be the point in the posts where I should you a picture of Henry playing outside, but I didn't think to take any (Not quite myself just yet, clearly).  So instead I will show you this one:

He walks around like this ALL THE TIME.  With a sword stuck in the back of his shirt.  Sometimes is a little one like that (officially called a 'sai' according to Nick, who keeps correcting me when I call it a sword), other times is a huge, curved sword he got from who knows where (NICK).  but the kid is ALWAYS armed... just in case. 

I used to worry about him forgetting it was back there when he goes to the bathroom, but then one day I walked in to find the long sword hanging in the toilet paper holder.  This kid, he's cleaver.

**In the background of this picture you can see a sneak peak of his outer space room on the wall!  I will try to remember to load pictures so you all can see how adorable the rest of it is this week**
 

A Month Gone By

One Month.  How can it have been that long already?

I feel a little lost today.   At 2am I woke up and thought, Here it is.  'A month since we lost her.'  And for the most part, every moment of this day since that 2am thought,  I have been thinking of little else.  Of our sweet Missy.  Of how much I miss her.  Of how I cannot believe it's already been a month.  How it is so unfair that the number of days and weeks, months and years will continue to tick by and I will keep thinking, again and again, how I can't believe it's been THIS long since we were together.

It is heartbreaking, in it's own way, how mommy blogs are usually for counting up the months; the days and weeks and years as our babies grow.   And that the last time I had posts labeled two weeks and a month was for my sweet boy.  And that makes me think of my parents.  Of how my grief is so terrible, and yet theirs is so very much worse.  And I wish I knew what to do to help them, but since I don't know what I need, it is the blind leading the blind.

On Tuesday night my parents and I went to the monthly Compassionate Friends meeting at our local Hospice Center.  It is a support group for people who have lost a child, grandchild or sibling.  And in that room, surrounded by people who truly understood, I was overcome with my own grief.  Listening to these people who have lived through this for much longer than a month telling me that what I am feeling and thinking is absolutely normal was more comforting than I can say. But it was a hard two hours, emotional and full of raw grief.  My parents and I were not really able to talk or share, but being there, surrounded by others who have lost a beloved family member, it helped to feel less alone.

Days.  Weeks.  Now months.  People say to us "I don't know how you are doing it".  The truth is, I don't know either.  A minute at a time I guess.  But the truth is, I miss her so much my heart is absolutely shattered.  I do not know how I am doing this, but what I do know is that it is forever changing who I am.  I am not the same person I was a month ago.  I am more fragile; more delicate; and maybe a little stronger that I thought possible.

I miss her so much.  I miss her laugh, I miss her smile.  I miss her hugs and I miss the way she made me feel when we were together. I miss talking to her, and I miss just knowing she was always here for me.  And I know I am not alone in this grief.   I thank God for Nick, I can't imagine this month without his love and support. Boo, Chris and our parents; we are together as much as possible, and we are doing our best to lean on each other, and to accept the love and support of our family and friends who want to be here for us.

Henry put his head on my lap earlier this week and just let out a sad sigh.  I asked him what was wrong and he said  "I am just so sad Aunt Mimi died."

Me too baby, me too.