Country Mom: Some Lila Related Photos..

I'm glad I was always such an avid photo taker. Otherwise I might not have the cd full of Lila photos that I have now. We are lucky enough to have over 100 photos of our precious girl.
If you read my last post (entitled- the worst day of my life) then you'll understand the background behind some of these photos I'm sharing with you today.

Lila's Room, she never got to use it, she was still in our room. I left it this way for a long time, actually- until I was ready to get pregnant again.The photo of her in her room would catch rainbows from the mirrored closet. I now think of rainbows as a reminder that she's up there waiting.
This is the morning of her funeral. One of the people in the funeral procession took this picture. The massive snow we'd had the morning of her death had all melted and flooded many of the roads... the fog was thick until midday- but it sure fit the mood we were all in. I was relieved it wasn't sunny on the day we had to bury our sweetheart.

At her funeral service, this is her casket. We kept it closed because we didn't think other people needed to see how horrible it is to look upon an infant that is gone... Those are her actual little shoes there on the table. I couldn't bear to put them on her, she hated shoes and hats, so I couldn't have the lady dress her with either. I knew she'd want to be without them. Deciding what to put in her casket was a hard thing to do, especially deciding what would be on her body forever. I chose her dedication dress that she'd worn just the Sunday before she passed away.

This is the actual snowy morning she passed. This is after we came home.

I knew that someday Maddie would ask me a lot of questions about that day, and I wanted to have something to show her, to comfort her. The day was so still, so quiet- most of the state couldn't get out of their houses that day, so there weren't cars on the road, everything was still.

This is one of the photos the nurses in the NICU took when Lila stayed there after her birth.

She had cleft palate (not cleft lip though) and didn't want to take a bottle. She stayed 2 weeks to learn how to eat, then she came home. I love this photo because it seems like she was praying for us, because she knew her time here was going to be very short.

My precious girl. She was so cranky this day, this was five days before she died.

She was crying, and I begged her to let mommy take just a few good photos of her. She grew quiet and still and let me do just that. It breaks my heart to know how cooperative she got when she had been fussy- again- it was like she just knew. Like she knew momma would need some photos to remember her by, so she sat still and pretty. What an angel.

We did a family photo at home in our living room with the camera timer. Boy am I glad we did, otherwise we wouldn't have a picture of all of us together like this. I had no idea how much this would mean while I was doing it. But that's how life works. Hindsight is 20/20.

Another photo of her funeral flowers, these are of the 45 arrangements I took apart, as you saw in our previous post, I photographed all of these separately for her memorial book.

Photography is something I love and I am glad I had something I could do to help ease the pain, keep me distracted, help me deal- and remember her all at the same time.

We dried these flowers and kept them... and as for the plants that they were mixed with, some of them are still alive after two years. My mom has been tending them in her office and at her home. It's nice to know that we made something good out of them instead of just keeping them until they all died. It makes me feel like there's something tangible that was for her.

Thanks for coming and looking at the pics, reading the stories, I can only hope that we help other moms. I want to reach out and hug every single person who's gone through this.