mother's day and two miles.

you know how you sometimes create this "perfect" days in your head and often times you are disappointed when things do not seem to go as planned. but then. sometimes it actually happens. where it exceeds those seemingly unrealistic expectations you can create in your little head. well for me that day was sunday. my second mother's day and my best one to date. last year we got in a little fight and ate lunch at plaza azteca (if you live in chesapeake you can see why that may not be the most special mother's day lunch. but i chose it. i wanted that homemade guacamole they make at your table). but this year my sweet husband really got it. not because i need all this attention or gifts. i just wanted to be loved a little extra on this day and that happened and then some. let's be honest i had cancer this year so its cool to celebrate a little more this year.

i knew justin would come through. he's good like that. the details. the letters. going the extra mile. he has always been like that, but cancer changed him. deeply changed him. hopefully you caught a glimpse of his blog post and video (check it out). i knew he was up to something on saturday when he was working on his mac for a while. but i did not ask. its best not to ask. just in case "what they are up to" is a surprise for you. he got up and grabbed ava and we sat in bed as he read his blog post and all three of us watched the video. i cried. through all of it. but listening to him read...I thought about one thing all day yesterday. What if we didn't have this day? What if Ava didn't have this day? I am so thankful today, maybe more than ever, for God and for you. This may not be what he meant when he wrote that...but i thought about cancer and what if i had not made it. so instead he and ava would have celebrated this day a lot differently than we did yesterday. i cry because i get sad a little about cancer and then i cry harder because i am so thankful for how it changed me and how i love my husband my daughter so differently because of it. yesterday was just special. so very very special. i was emotional because of how thankful i am for life and for my family. it was so joyous. remembering the last moments before we met our sweet ava and how incredible labor and delivery was for us. not always the case i know. how close i felt to justin. we were a team and we had just welcomed a new little teammate. little ava suzanna. not so little. she was nine pounds. but little to us. gosh, that was not even a year and a half ago and how our life has changed. but the Lord knew we need her during cancer. His perfect timing. how thankful we are for it.

we celebrated our mother's day with church, ava took a three hour nap (thank you) so we could watch a movie on a rainy sunday. then the sun came out and ava woke up and we took the back roads to the beach and ate lunch on the water. there was a monster truck show on the boardwalk in virginia beach. not totally our vibe. but we enjoyed the ocean and the sand. ava is not entirely sure how she feels about sand so we are working on it. but we walked and we played on the beach. took the back roads home, gave ava a bath, and relaxed for the night. it was good. it was so so good. thank you justin for how well you love me and thank you ava for making me a mommy. i love it more than i knew was even possible.

happy mother's day a day late to all you momma's. thank you to my own mom for helping make me into the mother i am today.

quick side note. not a big deal maybe to some of you and that is fine. i have not really exercised in a while. since maybe before we got married and then became utterly inactive for the past seven months. but i have been exercising a little bit more now and i want to run in the nashville half marathon next year. so i would not say i am training or anything yet, but today i ran two miles! its underlined because for me that is a big deal. i have never really trained for anything in my life and i am seriously excited about this. not excited really for the running. i do not like to run. but to train. to really commit to something and do it. i realized today how weak minded i am. but thankfully i had a tv to watch as i ran on the treadmill. that helped distract me. but you have to start somewhere and today i started with two miles. only 11.1 to go. i got this.

last side note: on the video justin asked me to say something to ava. i responded with "she tricked us." first off i was heavily medicated. that's why i sounded so strange. but she tricked us because she was three days past her due date and the day before we had scheduled an induction for the next week because i was not progressing. but little did we know that ava was going to make her appearance the very next day. hence the trick. but it was a good one.