Your Mommy Is Close By

 Our last full day together :(

We went to the mall to hang out.

We spent a lot of quarters, letting the girls ride these rides.

Tali was actually brave and let us put the quarters in (she never lets us do that).

A fun cupcake to climb.

These girls are getting so big!

Being with them, you could feel Jen was near. There was a time when Raden and I were playing a game, passing these plastic grapes back and forth. He would walk around the room and then come back to pass the grapes to me and then I would pass them back to him. We did this quite a few times and then one of the times when he was starting to walk around the room, he looked up as if someone were standing next to him and put his hand up to pass them the grapes. The grapes fell out of his hand, he smiled and picked them up, and came back to play with me.

Another time, Sage was sitting on my lap and then all the sudden pointed to the doorway to the kitchen and shouted a few times, jumping up and down, "It's mommy!!! Mommy!!" No one was in the kitchen. I just smiled and said, "Yup."

I miss her so much. It's hard to think about going through the rest of this life without her. I've spent my whole life being the big sister, trying to be a good example for her, looking out for her, protecting her... and in some ways it feels like she's now the big sister, doing/being those things for me. I love and miss her so much.