Leo, Our Little Lion Man

      So recently, this fear has been creeping up on me. I believe that it's part of grief. Grief is an old friend of mine. She really is. As a mother, grief isn't with me all the time anymore. But we still talk occasionally. When Leo's birthday came up this year, Grief didn't really visit me beforehand. I didn't cry every day leading up to it. I wasn't overcome with all of the wishes I had for my kid that can't be realized. I wasn't painfully aware of the timeline on the day of. This year Grief dropped in on Leo's birthday, but didn't stay for the party.      On March 7th, the anniversary of the day that I went into labor, Grief came and sat with me. We talked about what labor looked like and felt like. We talked about how I did in labor. We talked about the amazing things that my body did to birth a child. It was nice to have someone understand that on the day Leo was born, I felt like I hadn't done enough. Because Leo needed more help afte...

 Man, coming back on here after months is really not an easy thing. There's so much to say and at the same time nothing to say because nothing is happening at the moment.  So here's the gist of where our family is at after the winter:     We had wonderful holidays. Leo loves ripping paper and expressions from people so opening presents (not even his) is just a wonderful time. He continues to learn new things and grow in body control and expression. We are excited as we learn to communicate with him more and do our best to teach him to communicate. It is very much a team effort and we are so grateful that we can communicate with him more and get his preferences.      After the holidays we had some 5 or 6 weeks of sickness in our house. I think it's been a bad sick season all over. But we were very much feeling it. Thankfully, nothing was too terrible. We're also grateful that we never had 3 of us sick at once so usually there was a parent who has not fe...