Thank you so much. Thank you so much for thinking about me, for saying that my baby was beautiful. It helps my heart so much.

We made it through his first birthday and it was just like the "veterans" said, the leading up to the actual day was so, so much worse. I just wanted to lay down and die on January 30th--I just didn't think that I was going to make it, and I didn't want to. I was terrified to go to sleep that night and by the next morning, I knew why. Part of me actually believed that I was going to have to do it again: all of the trauma, all of the blood loss, surgery and very worst of all, the realization that my baby was unconscious in the NICU.

But I woke up.

And it was just morning. I was healthy, so much stronger than I was one year ago. No morphine, no blood, no horrible realization that my baby was sick. Just the peaceful feeling that I wanted to make this day nice for my son, for his memory. To spend the day with my husband and have a wonderful time together seemed like a perfect tribute to Nate, and I think it was.

Tom took the day off of work and I cancelled my music lessons for the day. We went to Home Depot to buy hardware for our new doors and then we bought a new orchid, something that I've decided to do every year on Nate's birthday. We cuddled together in the same recliner and watched tv. And we went to the cemetery. I had put together a little arrangement of daisies and little wooden cutouts of a train, a lion and an airplane that I had glued on dowels and stuck in among the flowers. We released some big, beautiful balloons that came with a huge flower arrangement from Tom's office. And we cried. It was so cold and snowing and the strong wind carried those balloons off fast--it was so hard to watch them disappear. But I think that we both felt good when we left.

That night I made a huge, cheesy lasagna and a chocolate and carmel cake. I opened the bottle of chianti that my mom had brought back from Florence and that I was saving for a special occasion. And it was good. Really good. The lasagna and the cake were pretty damn good, too.

And then today. Today is the day that we disconnected his life support. It was the day that I finally got it. He wasn't going to come out of this and he was already gone, really. I probably need to write about this, but I can't do it right now. Those days were so dark that I only remember them in black and white. Looking back, I have no idea how we made it through. Today, I'm going to stay busy, I think. I've got my baking class and then I'm going to pick up Nate's portrait. Maybe start painting Kaitlyn's bedroom. We've been in this house for like nine months and all of the walls are still white. I'm ready for some color in this place. I'm ready for some color in a lot of places.