1 Year

April 13th was Hawk's "Birthday." I put that in quotations, because I guess it's not your typical Birthday. It is the day he was born, but he had been dead for a couple weeks. And it's not the day he supposed to be born. But technically, since it is the day he was born, I guess it's his birthday. We brought out a couple small balloons to the cemetery, but it was snowing and blowing pretty hard, so we didn't put much out. I had spent the week prior painting and working on our dining room (and dealing with a foundation issue) and that weekend Aubrey and I celebrated our 5 year anniversary downtown. The day didn't hit us very hard. We've been busy. Two people brought us flowers and Aubrey's sister had a bracelet made for me with Hawk's name and birthday on it. People remembered his birthday without us saying anything about it. I was surprised at how thoughtful people can be. A year ago, we went through the most traumatic and emotional event of our lives. But we came to terms with it a long time ago. I wasn't apprehensive about the date coming up or how I would feel when it came. Hawk's death is what it is. We're okay. We're good even. We have an amazing little girl who makes us appreciate what we do have every single day. Yes, we wish Hawk was here, but he's not. We're glad that we had him as long as we did and that we can "celebrate" his "Birthday."

Hawk's Stone

Aubrey and I wanted to design Hawk's stone and not just pick a generic image. So it took us about 7 months to finalize a design. When it finally came in, it was wrong and had to be sent back and fixed. Now it is in for good and we love how it turned out. Our initial thoughts were to have an image of Muno from Yo Gabba Gabba or maybe a dirt bike. Something that was kid friendly and of interest to us. Luckily we took our time with it and came up with something more meaningful. The two trees symbolize Aubrey and I as a sort of protection. The saying, "See Ya Later, Hawk" is from Copper. Now our little man has his cemetery name tag.

(Copper loves dumping sand into all the grooves. It's real great.)