Christmas Cards

I have been receiving several beautiful Christmas cards in the mail from our family in friends these days. Some of those cards contain beautiful pictures of either the entire family or their children. I love to see these pictures because I get to see some pictures of the kids that do not live around me or that I don't get to see very often. This year has been a little bit sad in that respect..every picture I see of a happy family just reminds me of what is missing from our Christmas this year. I bought labels last year that had three kids on them thinking that we were going to have three living children this Christmas, and we would finally be a family of five instead of four. I sent out my Christmas cards and so far the response has been positive. I wasn't sure how people would take to seeing Aubree on our card because some people we know have never seen her pictures. I just felt like I needed to include her since she was a big part of 2010 even though she didn't get to experience much of it here. She defined this year for us in many ways. The only Christmas card I received yesterday was from the funeral home that we used for Aubree's service. Sad..This funeral home sent out some good reading materials on how to get through the holidays, and they sent out the Merry Christmas from Heaven poem. The most touching part of it all is that this funeral home puts up a memorial tree in their lobby to put glass ornaments with all of the names of the people that have passed on this past year. Each glass ornament contains the name and date of the person's death. They encourage the families to come and see the tree if they want to, and they told us in the letter that we can either pick up our ornament after the holidays or they will send it to us so we can put it on our trees every year or we can put it somewhere else if we want to. What a beautiful idea..I just wish that we didn't have to have a glass ornament at all though..I would much rather have Aubree instead. I would love to see her taking ornaments off of our tree, digging the presents, rolling around in the dog beds with the dogs, trying her first foods, smiling at me, maybe crawling, getting into things..Sigh..