Whew!

Life has been busy. My Google reader (love that thing!) shows I have 53 unread posts from the various blogs that I follow. That is a lot of reading that I haven’t been doing!

Not being at my computer that much has curtailed my good intentions of replying to some of your very sweet comments lately. It has also kept me from writing about Jenna’s birthday until now. And right now my brain is fuzzy and my bed is crying out to me, but I will try to see if I can capture at least a smidget of that wonderful day for you.

I stuffed all of your lovely, beyond-words-special cards in a big envelope and saved them for Jenna’s special day.  Jenna was blessed with beautiful words from friends she had never met here on earth as well as from people whom she knew well, she received handmade cards, cards from little girls her own age, cards with dum dum lollipops taped on it (if you ever saw Jenna begging lollipops from our pastor after a church service you’d know how much she loved them), a hand-drawn picture of Jenna, and even the print-out of a long lost forum topic where all my cyber friends welcomed Jenna on the day of her birth. (Thanks, Donna!) I opened the cards one by one at Jenna’s party and read it with my mom and my friends. They brought tears to my eyes. THANK YOU ALL!!! I couldn’t bear to tie them to the balloons and send them away so I am going to paste them in a scrapbook instead.

We had a lovely day and it was so effortless for me since my friends were such a help! A sweet friend from church offered the use of her gorgeous pool deck, another dear friend brought bunches of balloons and paper products, and chef friend Holland baked white and pink cupcakes with marshmallow daisies on them.

It was a sacrifice for my church friends to even be at the party since we have had so many church meetings this weekend and everyone was tired, but they came anyway and that really touched my heart.

Everyone was having so much fun in the pool I didn’t want to break it up but at one point I handed out the balloons, and those who wanted to wrote a message to Jenna on theirs. We sang her a happy birthday, with our faces turned heavenwards, and released the balloons, watching them drift out of sight. Sending up balloons will never fail to move me.

We managed to sneak into the cemetary with a full two minutes to go before gate-closing time. 🙂 I couldn’t fully enjoy being there knowing that we were going to be booted out at any second, but we left Jenna a special little keepsake and a cupcake. 😀 Her grave stone is in but it was full of sand splatters from the rainstorms. It doesn’t quite look like I envisioned it, but I will take a picture of it next time, when I have had a chance to clean it nicely.  

Thank you all again for the lovely support we received from you all in the form of blog comments, birthday cards and gifts, (Cindy, what can I say? ) and your prayers. The day would have been much less special and a whole lot more difficult if it weren’t for all of you!

I have a lot of ‘blog fodder’ at the moment, there is so much I want to write about, but I will call it a day for now.  I am ‘poegaai’, or for those of you who do not understand Afrikaans, I am pooped.