...And make it okay. I miss you....

Reese and Mama.

Title comes from Avril Lavigne's "When You're Gone", a new favorite of Reese's. In some thing of a dedication to Murphy, who saw a lot with me in the short time we had to travel together. I'll miss you, Murph. And the sad thing is I tear up as I write this. Maybe it's because he was my first car, maybe it's the trauma that's still processing from the wreck, but either way, I miss Murphy, and I hate the fact I cry over a car. It's a car, not even a fancy-schmany one either. But I guess...he was my car, so....yeah. I don't really want to name my next car Murphy, but I don't want to confuse Reese either, and all SUVs are Murphies to her.

Anyway, random news post. We'll get over the boring news of me first, then move on to Kiddo. I'm slowly, but steadily, healing physically. The scabs are getting smaller and falling off, the bruises are fading, the whole body ache is fading. The worst (and most persistent) is my right hand, which is giving me fits. My thumb is still basically useless, and my index finger is pretty bruised, but (at least I hope) sooner or later that'll heal too. The mental aches are more my real concern. All I can say is my therapist will be earning his money for a while. When I shelve books, if I forget to draw out the book holder before I shove in books, it pops loose with a loud 'POP' and that sends me into a 2 second panic every time. Anything falling near me (which the books in back are prone to doing. They used me for target practice before the wreck) or banging loudly against something literally sends me shaking. Left hand turns scare the be-jesus out of me, and I constantly grit my jaw, even as competent of a driver as my Dad is, when we have to turn into traffic. I have to talk myself through my grandma's driving, distracting myself, because I have no where near as much faith in her driving. But yeah, Britt'll be earning his paycheck.

And onto Reese. She's been wearing big-girl panties while she's awake for the last week and a half or so, with only 1 accident. We think she got distracted and had a little of an accident, realized it, and stopped, because once we got her out of her wet clothes, she still had to go to the bathroom. So she's doing really well. She'll have her "xiao dance shoes" in no time, I'm sure.

Her big birthday party, a.k.a the one we're having with all kinds of friends invited too, is on Sunday. We're having it at a McDonald's where they have a birthday party room and all, so we took her there this past Sunday to let her get used to the tubes. She'd never been in them before, so it took a little work to get her in them the first time but after that she loved it. Sadly, I forgot the camera at home. Yeah, I know, bad Monica. But anyway, her party is on Sunday, which is also our 5 month Gotcha Day anniversary. And 20 days after her real birthday, but hey. We're trying. LOL.

She has recently developed a love for a certain comfort food of my own known as Strawberries 'N Creme Oatmeal. Or as she refers to it, 'oatmilk'. It's an almost no-fail food now.

She really is a bright, little thing. She understands Murphy 'has a boo-boo', and we're beginning to think she even understands Murphy isn't coming home. That Murphy has a bad boo-boo. All I can hope for is that she doesn't realize for quite some time that people can get bad boo-boos that make them not come home too. At some point, there will be a new "Murphy", if I call it Murphy. I may not be able to, confuse Reese's English or not. I may even be surprised if I bother to name it. When you name something, it hurts twice as bad to lose it, I think. So the next one may just be "The Explorer" or what ever it ends up being, like the truck we have is either "The Truck" or "The Tundra".