[/caption]"Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." Elizabeth Stone
Sometimes I feel jealous of the younger me. Not for the reasons you might think--youthful beauty, innocence, coolness (Thom would wonder, "Were you ever really cool?). The other day I was sitting in the green room looking at the photos on the wall. One of them was taken a few days after Ellie passed. I am wearing a pink hat given to us by a hospice nurse that says, "jilled", snuggling up to Lotta. As I looked at the photo it amazed me that I even took a photo so soon after Ellie passed. Then I had that old yearning. In that photo it had been mere DAYS since I had seen, felt, touched, smelled Ellie, whereas now it has been almost a year and a half. How I yearned to be that younger me, the one who had so recently been in Ellie's physical presence.
[caption id="attachment_4674" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Angel watching."]
[/caption]Recently, I drove past the funeral home that cremated Ellie, as I often do. As I passed it I suddenly was struck, it felt as if I was literally punched in the stomach with the feeling I had the day the funeral home took Ellie's body. The moment they carried her body down the stairs, I wanted to race at them, demanding that they NOT take my daughter. At the same time, I absolutely knew how irrational the whole thought process was. That desperate feeling engulfed me, making for quite dangerous driving conditions, as you can well imagine. Time continues to move at an odd pace. At times it seems so long long ago when Ellie was with us and then it flips suddenly seeming so recent.
This last week, Lotta caught a cold. Saturday was the worst of it, she was lethargic and couldn't keep anything down and started breathing in a wheezy way. Growing up experiencing asthma I have an extremely low
tolerance for hearing my children struggling to breathe. Lotta progressively got worse throughout the day. By 3am, as she lay shaking the bed in her attempts to pull in oxygen, I decided it was time to go to the ER. What a wange (weird strange) time to go to the ER. First of all because it is 3am, which to my way of living, is not a typical hour I am driving around town. Second, it was wange to go to Ellie's hospital. Somehow I felt as if I might encounter Ellie there. I mean really all the experience's we had there, they should just rename the whole place. Sheesh. One of the first things our ER nurse said to Lotta as he put on her respiratory monitor was, "You're not in trouble". Which, as you may or may not know, was one of Ellie's favorite things to reassure others. Thirdly, Lotta is the exact age Ellie was when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Everything but everything was so 
incredibly frightening to sweet Lotta (and sweet Ellie or "Swellie" as she would probably say). Even putting the ID bracelet on, listening to her breathe, looking in her ears, were extremely upsetting. All of it was terrifying. It also amazed me how, particularly in the ER, where everything is URGENT, I can be talked into things like rectal thermometers, chest x-rays, which in the light of day seem CRAZY. As we were going through it, I had a moment of worry that this was going to scar Lotta emotionally. Then, as we were leaving, Lotta was walking around, making friends with one of the nurses (just like her sister would have!) Not a trace of what had happened left on her, except for of course that she was now breathing easier. They are so resilient at this age. AND I am greatful that we somehow survived Ellie's hospital experiences and that Lotta and Ben are getting to experience something different.
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