Travel and Great News!

Our new place!
Tim and Timmy at our resort in San Diego

Timmy at Polar Bear exhibit at Sea World

Let's watch a Disneyland parade!

Tim, Rick, Rachel, Timmy ad I at the Bug's Life attraction at Disneyland

Groom's cake for Rehearsal dinner for Rick and Rachel's wedding. This cake was made in a borrowed kitchen by Kate Wilkerson (Tim and Rick's very talented cousin)

Take a bow Kate!

Timmy playing with "Uncle Boo-Boo"

Congratulations Rick and Rachel!

Timmy and Grandma Jan

Great news! We got the results of our quad screen test back today for the new baby. It was negative! This is not a 100% positive assurance that there are no major issues, but it indicates that there are no markers for increased risk. So the baby is most likely free of genetic disorders and neural tube defects. What great news!

Tim and I also got to peek at the baby this week. It took the midwife a really long time to get the heartbeat because the baby kept moving so much. "She" is an active little one! When we did a quick ultrasound, she was pretty much break-dancing. A LOT of movement!

We are getting ready to move to Texas, and the move will take place right as I would ordinarily be getting the anatomy ultrasound done. This is obviously a huge issue for us, since we really cling to more and more positive assurance that the baby is doing well. Thanks to a really supportive staff at the hospital, we were able to finagle a slightly early appointment for the "big ultrasound" so it could be accomplished before I move. I am really happy to be getting this done at our hospital so we do not have to worry about setting up appointments and waiting for availability when we get to Texas. I also happen to particularly like the staff at our hospital. So, God willing, we will arrive in San Antonio with some extra assurance and some knowledge about the baby's gender. Great news!

We just returned from two weeks of fun travel. Tim, Timmy and I went to San Diego to attend Rick's (Tim's brother) wedding. While we were there, we took a week to vacation at Disneyland, Sea World and around San Diego. We had a blast and really enjoyed the family time. Rick and Rachel had a beautiful wedding that was definitely memorable for everyone.

After our vacation, Tim returned to Kansas for field training and I flew directly to San Antonio to look for a house. Timmy stayed with his grandparents in California and had a blast! San Antonio was surprisingly relaxing for me, and turned out to be just what I needed. I was in a great hotel (highly recommend the Townplace Suites by Marriott if you are ever in San Antonio). The hotel had every service imaginable (for free!) and included two meals a day (well, if you don't mind hotdogs and tacos for dinner). They even shop at a local grocery store for you! So, for a week I had no childcare responsibilities, someone else had the reigns for my company and I didn't have to cook. I had a blast (despite being a little lonely). I am feeling great (have to look at my expanding belly to convince myself I am pregnant) and was able to work out every day (three miles of running, one mile power walk).

The good news from last week is that I found a great place to live. We will be living in Cibolo, Texas, which is slightly north of San Antonio, in the suburbs. The house is absolutely beautiful, with much more space and a lot of nice little features (garden tub, window seats in the master bedroom, open floor plan, really clean and new). I was really happy with this place and super excited to move in!

I only have one and half weeks left in command (change of command is 7 May). Leaving command will be a little bittersweet, but I am really looking forward to the next step in my career. It will be nice to have a solid two years of being responsible only for myself and my family instead of 300+ Soldiers. It has truly been an honor to serve, but it will be an honor to pass the reigns and move on as well. It will be a mixed blessing to move on to San Antonio and start the Baylor program.

...Moving Forward

On my last post, I titled "Looking back and moving forward." Well, I sort of omitted the part about "moving forward." So, here goes:

Ahem.

WE'RE PREGNANT!

Tim and I have been blessed with this fun little secret for about 14 weeks now. We have been very, very nervous about everything, especially given our last experience with pregnancy. However, we have had a few ultrasounds and some paranoia-generated heartbeat checks, but everything has always checked out just fine. Our last little check-up was last week, where baby Decker's heartbeat was 156 bpm, right on track.

As for me, this pregnancy has been (physically) a piece of cake. A little nausea, but I am holding a personal record for not yacking through the entire first trimester. I am still running and all of my energy has returned since moving into the second trimester. This has been my easiest pregnancy yet, but I guess after the last one, almost anything would seem easy.

I have been saying a daily prayer for Baby Decker, and I would like to humbly ask for additional prayers as well. I pray that this baby will be kept healthy and formed in the image that God has planned. (We would really like to have a little girl, but I haven't quite gotten the audacity to ask God for that one yet. I do, however, refer to the baby as "she" in my prayers. I am sure God is pretty good with hints.)

One another note, I have a few messages for some special people:

Congratulations Craig and Karen Bender on the birth of your third baby! Karen, we wish you a speedy recovery and hope that you enjoy these precious first moments.

Heather Sample & family: We are thinking of you as you approach your "one year." We will all remember Brian with fond memories and be thankful for the precious time that he had in your life. Heather, you are are a rock solid woman! You get my enduring respect for the graceful way you have dealt with your loss. Brian was one lucky man to have you walk beside him on the most difficult (and probably most rewarding) portion of his life. You gave him an opportunity to become a husband and a Dad and experience as much as possible out of the time he had left. My hats off to you and my prayers are with you as well, Heather.

Happy birthday Mom Barkley and Mom Decker! 35 never felt so gooood!

Looking Back and Moving Forward

On Friday we honored the first anniversary of Emma's death. I have been anticipating this event for several weeks now with a bittersweet mixture of resumed grief and a positive sense of moving forward. Tim and I took a few hours off from work on Friday to have lunch and make the drive to Herington to visit Emma's grave. We planted tulips next to her grave, since Tulips will always bloom each year around her birthday. Tulips were also the flowers that I chose to carry in her honor at her funeral and the flowers that all of the family members placed on her casket to be buried with her. Not a spring will go by from now on that I will not see tulips and think of Emma.

While Tim and I were at the grave, we took the time to go through my boxes of things we have collected to remember her. It has been a while since I have gone through these boxes, which is a mark of healing, I suppose. Going through these items was definitely sad for the two of us, but it was also an experience of healing. One year later I can go through the boxes without sobbing. I can look at the few Earthly reminders that we have of Emma and remember her with a sense of warmth. In the past few days and weeks, I have relived almost every experience that I had through Emma's birth and the days beyond. Now as I reflect on these experiences one year later, I certainly remember the heartbreak and the sadness, but what is significant is that I can look at these experiences with happy remembrance as well. All of the events that surrounded this chapter of tragedy in our lives have been somewhat revised in my memory with a much more positive spin. The positive, warm memories stand out in my mind due to the love of friends and family that surrounded Tim, Emma and I and lifted us up through our darkness.

As we look back, we remember Dr. Evans, the maternal fetal medicine specialist who walked us through every step from the initial bad news to our discharge from the hospital. He is one of only a handful of doctors in Kansas that has the training to deal with high risk pregnancies, so it is not surprising that his patient load is enormous. Still, he took three hours of his time to go through every option with us, look up research in personal library and help navigate us through the hardest decisions of our lives. Through it all, he treated us like we were his only patients, though I knew we were just one couple of many. When I was in the hospital, every one of his staff came up to the ward to visit me--from the ultrasound tech to his nurses. This small gesture really made an impression. We were one of many, but we were made to feel special and loved by a wonderful staff led by a truly remarkable doctor.

Shortly before Emma was born, Corey and Kelly Boernsen moved in to our house for a few weeks. This was a blessing in our lives at exactly the time that we needed it. I met Kelly for the first time and it seemed like we had known each other for our entire lives. Corey and Kelly (with the creative help of Ryan and Nancy Kules) orchestrated the melon smashing event that I will never forget. (Sometimes I just want to go do it again simply because it was fun and completely childish.) Standing in our driveway in the middle of the night with melons, an axe, a a hammer, a bag of tomatoes and our closest friends and family was a memory I will carry for a lifetime. Now, one year later, I recently had the opportunity to fill out a background check questionnaire for Kelly's new job. When it asked me how long I had known her, I had to catch myself and fill out the truth-only one year. It seemed a little hard to believe given the special place that she and Corey have in our lives.

LTC Sherri Franklin walked beside me every step of the way through the entire pregnancy with Emma. She went out of her way to take care of me in every conceivable way. She took care of my physical needs as a health care provider, and also served my emotional needs as a friend and mentor. She visited me an hour away in Topeka, after working a full day herself and still having a family in need of dinner. She called to check up on and helped me keep my head up when I needed that strength. On Emma's birthday this year, she remembered to call and even sent flowers. LTC Franklin is a woman who is truly filled with a lot of love. Her patients are lucky to have a provider with such love and compassion. It is her love that defines her as a person and also as a provider and sets her apart from everyone else. I owe a lot to this very special person.

Chaplain Diana Crane also walked with me through this entire experience. She has been a chaplain and a friend to me in the two years that we have known each other. She's often overbooked in her service to the Lord, but she found the time to help me co-found a pregnancy and infant loss support group for our hospital. Working with this group has helped me find some positive meaning to our tragedy and assist others who have walked a sad mile in my shoes. Diana took care of all of the funeral arrangements and officiated the ceremony. Her words brought comfort to us, not just because they were spoken from someone so dear to us, but because she has a special way of putting together just the right sentiment for each moment.

Tim and I also felt surrounded by the love of our family. We had so many family in the house for Emma's funeral that we had to arrange a sleeping chart to account for all of the floor space and bed space in our house. Our family cooked for us and helped with all of the details of daily living that we didn't have the energy to fulfill around the time of the funeral.

Our list can go on and on. We were surrounded by love by so many friends and family who called, sent flowers and cards and attended the funeral. We anticipated a small memorial with pretty much just family, but were greeted by a church full of people on the day of Emma's funeral. None of these people knew Emma, so we can only judge their presence have been a sign of love and support for our family. We felt incredibly blessed.

For some reason I have had a lot of church hymns in my head lately. When I reflect on this experience, I can't help but sing to myself the old tune "Love Lifted Me."

"When nothing else could help...love lifted me." This song reminds me of the love that surrounded us through our experience and lifted us up in our sadness. This love was powerful enough to completely reshape our entire memory of these events, thus allowing us to remember more of the acts of love, kindness and friendship than the moments of grief and sadness. To all of our friends and family, we thank you for that.

. Tulips outside our house bloomed on Emma's birthday

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone! Today has been a really fun holiday for our family. We started the day by sleeping in (Timmy crawled in bed with us around 0700 and graced us with an extra hour of sleep). When we woke up, Timmy was excited to find that the Easter bunny had visited the house! He gathered eggs all the way to his Easter basket, which consisted of cars, eggs and candy. He was thrilled! Tim blessed us with his pancake-oriented culinary skills and then we were off to church. For Easter, Timmy wore a summer pin-striped suit with a peach tie. He impressed all the little ladies in his nursery class!

"I don't want to go to church!"

Getting through the Easter sermon was a little bit of an unexpected challenge for me this morning. Despite the festive mood that we created with our morning Easter egg hunt, I couldn't help but look back at Easter last year. I imagine that Easter will always remind me of Emma Grace. Last year we tried to push back the tears and celebrate Easter, despite being in the middle of planning a funeral for Emma. Sitting in church reminded me a lot of last Easter. I am pretty sure I am the only nerd in church that got misty-eyed during the second verse of "Because He Lives." The verse references the fact that holding a newborn baby is one of the greatest joys in the human experience, but implies that the joy is nothing compared to entering Heaven. I like to think that the joy that Tim and I sacrificed in holding Emma was traded for the joy that she experienced upon entering Heaven. Hence, the tears.

We got through the sermon and then got a great Easter Brunch at the conference center on Fort Riley. This was a special treat because Timmy got to play outside for a while after lunch. He jumped in a bouncy house and greeted some friends at the Easter egg hunt. (Well, he more or less sat in the bouncy house and let all the other kids bounce him, and we missed the Easter egg hunt in favor of an afternoon nap). We came home, napped and did another Easter egg hunt in front of the house. What a fun day!

Selling the House

We are pleased to announce that we are 50% finished with the sale of our house. We got an offer last week and accepted. We are now going through the home inspections, etc. Unfortunately, getting to this point has led us on a crash collision with Murphy's Law. we've had some "fun" with an unexpected problem with our septic tank, but we got everything fixed and replaced. We just now need to repair the entire backyard that we spent all of last summer and fall getting prepared. Oh well, we are at least happy that everything is taken care of and seems to be back in working order.

Last weekend was our annual St. Patrick's Day Road Race. Tim and I ran this together, as we have done for the last several years. we had a great time and rewarded ourselves with a huge Chipotle burrito afterwards. I have some pictures that I will post when I get them.

Timmy is doing great. he is already wearing size 3T clothing because he is so tall! He is practically making speeches now and seems to enjoy every moment of life. He really enjoys sitting down to do crafts and coloring, or play with play dough. His attention span with these tasks is pretty long for a little boy. Most of the time Tim and I get bored before he does! This is a nice trait though, because it means we can always find a quiet task for him to do when we need him to settle down. WE are able to take him with us almost anywhere, to include nicer restaurants. He doesn't make a peep as long as he has some crayons or stickers.

HUGE NEWS! We are really excited to announce the arrival of my new niece, Wren Cedella Barkley. Brian and Karle finally met their long-awaited daughter a few weeks ago. We are happy to announce that both Mom and baby are doing great. We have seen lots of pictures and she is absolutely perfect. Way to go Brian and Karle! I guess it is a little surreal seeing my brother holding his baby girl in his arms, much the same way that it seemed like a dream to hold Timmy in our arms the first time. We are so happy for them as they start this chapter of their lives. Brian is taking classes, working full time and now juggling parenthood. I am not sure when he gets a chance to sleep, but he's doing a great job!

The month of April will be a busy one for us! We are going to California to celebrate the wedding of Rick (Tim's brother) and Rachel (beautiful bride). I will also be going to San Antonio to pick out a house to live in while I am attending Baylor. Given my lack of decision-making capability while shopping, this should prove to be quite an adventure. This goes double considering the fact that Tim (my voice of reason and decision) will not be there. I have five days to make a decision. While I am there I also need to finalize some tasks with getting our au pair ready to join our home. I talk to Cansu almost daily via e-mail. I am excited to get to know here a lot better and hear about life in Turkey. The more I get to know her, the more I am getting excited about her arrival. She seems like such a sweet person and such a great fit for our family. I have never participated in a cultural exchange type program before, so this will be a new adventure for me as well! From everyone I have talked to who has ever hosted an au pair, the experience has been great.

I Love it When a Plan Comes Together...

We have been fairly busy lately trying to plan out our transition into the next phase of our careers and our next phase for our family. As you probably know, Tim and I will be separating for about 18 months while I attend Baylor University and Tim deploys later in the year. We hope to join back together at our next assignment (wherever that may be). Needless to say, this all takes quite a bit of planning and preparation. We are working on selling our house, and even got our first offer this weekend! We are crossing our fingers that this will work out.

Our biggest news is that we have picked our au pair! Our new au pair's name is Cansu, and she comes from Turkey. She will be joining us on May 27th in San Antonio. Cansu likes swimming, jogging and dogs (sounds like a great match!). She has a degree in Foreign Trade and is looking forward to coming to the US to help with childcare and to experience American culture. I am really looking forward to her arrival. It will be nice to have someone else around to help fill the empty house and make it much warmer. Her help with Timmy will make it much easier for me to go to school and study.

I am enclosing a picture of Cansu. She said I could post it. :)

Busy in March

We have been quite delinqent in posting any updates through the winter. We have been fairly busy, mostly with preparations to move and our attempt at selling our house. OUr house officially went on the market about three weeks ago, which meant that we have a flurry of little projects to complete right before then. Since it has been on the market, we have had a steady stream of people coming by to look at it. On most occasions we have only gotten a hour or two worth of notice before the showing. This can be a bit of a challenge when you are working and have to find a place to stash a 140-lb dog! We have gotten used to keeping the house clean to OCD standards, but still we end up scrambling each time we have a potential buyer!



I am currently looking for my next place in San Antonio. There are a lot of great houses out there, and I plan to go in April to sign a lease on one of them. In fact, we are all looking forward to April. Tim's brother, Rick, is getting married in San Diego and we plan to take a family vacation there for a week. After our week in San Diego, I will be flying to San Antonio for a week to find a house.



I change command on May 7. This has been a good experience, though I am getting fairly tired and look forward to having just myself and my family to care for. It will be nice to take some time off in conjunction with the move and decompress a little bit before starting school at Baylor University. We have also planned to host an international au pair during the time that I am in San Antonio. She will help me out tremendously with taking care of Timmy. It will also be nice to have another adult around in the house, since Tim will not be able to join us in San Antonio. I am currently interviewing, and hope to select an au pair really soon!

Pictures and videos

I have gotten a few minutes to work on pictures and videos. It has been absolutely FRIGID here for a while, so other than the quick photo ops, we have stayed inside as much as possible.

Here is our video for 2009:

Sledding!

Sledding Fun with Grandpa

Not the most appealing subject matter...but I was learning my new camera attachments


Could this be any more fun?

Fun with Grandpa

Grandma, Grandpa and Timmy

Love my new circular polorizing lens filter....

Vivid color enhancement setting with snow? I don't like it.

I introduce the photo-centric blogs. I don't have much to say today other than we spent a good portion of the day sledding and having fun with my parents and Timmy. I got some cool gadgets to help with my attempt at learning to take good photographs. So far, my attempts have been pretty lame, but in the last few days I ha at least learned a few techniques and settings that I would rather NOT use again. Anyway, here are some pictures of today's sledding trip. Try to ignore the lack of color sense in these pictures. I guess great photographers aren't born they are created...through lots of trial and error. :) Today's lesson: pictures don't edit well as JPEGs. RAW formats are the way to go.

Merry Christmas!

We had a wonderful Christmas day!

Our Christmas adventures really started two days ago when we picked up my parents in Kansas City. For those of you who have even spent 30 seconds in front of the tube this week, you will know that a major blizzard has been heading through the Central US. We were incredibly lucky thta Mom and Dad's plane arrived early on Wednesday. We stayed overnight in Kansas City and then drove back the next morning. Our drive home was a bit of a white-knuckle affair, but we were fortunate to have made a safe trip.

is morning we woke up to a VERY white Christmas, complete with snowdifts and blowing winds over 30 mph. We turned on the weather channel and were thrilled to see that we can expect the temperatures to blast through the teens at least a few times this week. :)

This year was an especially bit treat for all of us, as Timmy was finally old enough to experience some of the "magic" of Christmas. He was thrilled that Santa came last night and brought a table and chairs and a mini trampoline. Christmas morning lasted the better part of three hours today due to requisite ten minutes of play begged by each newly opened toy. We all had a blast helping Timmy enjoy his new toys. Unfortunately, Timmy didn't last quite as long as his toy pile, so we had to interrupt the Christmas experience for a long nap this morning. Our sleepy head fell into bed still clutching his new toys.

After opening presents, we enjoyed a Christmas turkey dinner with some friends from work.

We hope that you are all enjoying your Christmas Day. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

Ho, Ho Humble

Ahhh....Pancake Zen

Tuckered out after Christmas shopping

God Bless Little Boys...

Timmy playing our fishing game

These past few weeks I have been forced to eat a big 'ole slice of humble pie. Luckily, these are all just occurrences of Life's little annoyances, but it does serve as a reminder that I am not as in charge as I'd like to think.

So, I'll start with the quote of the month:

"Geez, I've never seen anything like this before. But don't worry...if we can't fix it, we will send it out to our Geek network. They can fix 99% of all problems I have ever seen." ~Quote by the Best Buy Geek Squad expert attempting to retrieve my hard drive.

Only to be followed up by the second quote of the month....

"We sent this out to our (uber) Geek network, and we just can't figure this out. But, for $1500 you can send it to a professional file retrieval service who can dismantle your hard drive and sometimes retrieve files."~ Geek Squad associate defeated by Kim Decker's bad luck with computers

So, alas, I lost an entire hard drive's worth of files. Needless to say, this was not the memorable Thanksgiving Day experience I was looking for. I am not really sure how one can have a computer with ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WRONG....(except that it ate over 25 GB of files) and still manage to lose all data. But, it happened. I have lost everything that I have done since April, when I got my new computer. This includes the 150-page book that I wrote about my experiences with my pregnancy loss with Emma, and all pictures that I took since then. I was devastated.

So, Part II:
A good friend of mine warned me that the holidays might "creep up" on me with respect to grieving for Emma. I discounted this advice, until we started decorating the tree. It was really hard to bring out all of the Christmas decorations and remember the joy that we were experiencing at this time last Christmas. We were on top of the world: Tim and I were reuniting our family after a six month military separation, we were pregnant and we couldn't have been more happy. It is a little hard to revisit those memories in hindsight, and reflect on the intensity of the pain that was to come. There is something about the Christmas decorations that flood back those memories that I have revised in my mind.

So, Tim and I decided that a healthy way to deal with this residual grief would be to honor Emma with an ornament on the tree. I set aside a special time to shop for the perfect ornament. I finally found a white little ceramic angel holding a little puppy dog in her hands. I wasn't really fond of the puppy dog image, but I liked the sentiment that the ornament created. It made me think of angels holding little Emma in their arms in Heaven. I purchased the ornament and very carefully wrapped it up for transport home, thinking all the while that I would likely lose my mind if the ornament broke. It would just break my heart to lose the ornament after also losing the precious baby it represented.

So, I get home and put the ornament in a safe place. When I felt the time was right, I pulled out the ornament and showed it to Tim. As we were preparing to place it on the tree and honor Emma, I dropped the ornament. Needless to say, this story did not have a happy ending. the ornament shattered into a million pieces (not just a broken wing or a small nick...it was completely unsalvageable). I promised myself I wouldn't cry. I stiffened my lower lip, turned on my heels and went to bed (without a stiff drink).

Part III: Tim and I decided to shop for a more durable ornament to honor Emma (something made of titanic, perhaps). We went shopping and finally found a Hallmark ornament designed to honor the memory of a loved one. It was also nicely created from plastic and had no small part that I could break. I bought the ornament and cried in Hallmark at the register like a complete crazy person (so much for the stiff lower lip). We decided to go ahead and head home after this, as Tim and I were not much in the mood to continue Christmas shopping. On the way home, we needed to stop at Target to pick up some jeans for Timmy, who has managed to put holes in 8 pairs of jeans in the last 3 weeks. While at Target, Timmy managed to wiggle out of his seat, lean over the shopping cart and fall straight on his head. I felt so bad for him. He was ultimately okay, but he definitely screamed for a while and probably had a pretty significant headache the rest of the night.

So, I do all of the complaining to make this observation: I am not in control of my life, God is. We get handed circumstances, some frustrating, some heartbreaking, and some thought-provoking. Our res ponses to these life events define the lives that we lead and the capacity that we have to experience joy. This holiday season, it is important to remember those who have been loved and lost. But it is also important to focus on those people still left in our lives. While we have the opportunity, it is important to wrap our arms around the loved ones we have with us and never be to rushed or distracted to show them the love and kindness they deserve. After getting so lost in my memories and grief over Emma, I was definitely reminded this week of how important it is to focus attention on Tim and Timmy. Today, we cleared our schedule of everything that "had" to be done, and just spent the day together. Though I would certainly have preferred to skip the little frustrations I have experienced lately, I will have to admit these experiences have brought the important things back into focus.

Happy Fall!

Having fun on my retro rocket!
My new set of wheels

Can't get enough of the flamingos at the zoo

Some Halloween fun with my friend Evie

What do you mean I can't grab ALL the ducks? Don't you know who I am?

Monkey business with Mom the Giant Banana

Fall festival at Daycare