15 Months

It's here!  The last day of school for Grady!  Julia and David have been out since last Tuesday.  But today is Grady's last day.  He had his end of year party yesterday and today we will go to the neighborhood pool with our friends and jump in in our clothes and have a great time before coming home for dinner and then rushing out to our baseball tournament.

It's been such a good year.  And it's mostly and entirely due to these two right here ...

His teacher is just so nice.  SO NICE.  She is just. So. Nice.  There isn't a mean bone in her body and I can't believe people like that exist but she does and I'm so grateful to her.  She listened to me cry about my Aunt.  She listened to me talk about a problem I had with J at school.  She talked to me about Grady.  We talked about cell phones and bullies.

And she spent time with my kid.  He always wanted to bring things to show her.  He always wanted to print pictures of our trips to show her.  He wanted to please her because he knew she was interested.

Kids always know when adults take an interest, a real interest, in them.  They can see through fake anything.  They know when people genuinely care and this woman GENUINELY cared.

But Stacy, all teachers genuinely care.

I have a kinder and 1st grade teacher I can talk to you about, if you want.  Kinder was a teacher that favored girls.  If you don't think such a thing exists you can message me.  He did great.  Because we will always do our best even with mediocre teachers.  They won't all be good.  And like I told him about next year ... he may not get someone so special as Mrs. S.  But we still have to learn and do our best and be awesome.

But this year he had a teacher that saw him.  That saw that he was special.  How it lifted my heart to have another person see my kid so well.

And truth be told she was great to all her kids.  It was such a blessed year.  I am so grateful.

On to summer!

We're still under a cloud.  It hangs over everything.  I am a person who desperately looks for signs.  So while we were in Disney every purple balloon made me think of her, and that made me think she was there, that she was happy, that she liked seeing her people having fun.  And then the bubble wand ... the Ariel bubble wand that someone accidentally put in our friends stroller, that she then handed to Julia (who'd been asking for one for two days).  It felt like it was from her, because had she been there, and Julia had asked for that wand ... she would have bought it for her.

And the wand is part purple.

When I read up on pixar fest and all the new shows around friendship and togetherness I thought oh how silly and smultzy.  And Coco was everywhere.  And the lyrics and message of Coco (and Up) kind of hit me really hard.

These are universal themes ... people we love die.  Lord willing we live long enough to witness the older generations leave before us.  And I will continue to look for signs of her in every day.  Because it helps me.  And my faith tells me I will see her again, and I lean heavily on that.  It's hard.  I have questions and doubt.  I really, really, really want to believe things can be like Coco, we can put up pictures of our loved ones so that we may see them one night a year.  It's such a nice and loving thing to think.

So I will.