Celebrating Anniversaries

Hannah's year mark is less then a month away. I'm not sure what I want to do for it or what traditions I should start.

The day after she died, it happened to be April's birthday. April is my neighbor and when I found Hannah, I ran and got her to help me. She called 911 and did CPR on Hannah. Even though I wish I would have thought about doing those things myself and will always be grateful that she was there. April came over that day with a bunch of balloons and explained that she wasn't in much of a celebrating mood and got balloons to send off to Hannah. It was a great thing for our family.

(April is in the red jacket with her baby due in June.)

For Hannah's 6 month mark, the Crawford's meet us at the cemetery. We sang "Families are Together Forever", mentioned any memories that came to mind, then released balloons to Hannah. I also had some fresh flowers for her and Teasha had a nice plotted plant. Afterwards we went to Burger King to let the kids play.

For Hannah's birthday, we had a fake cupcake that we took to her site and sang Happy Birthday. Unfortunately it got dark and cold quickly that night and there was snow everywhere. It's harder to visit her in the winter time. We came back to our house to eat cupcakes. Robert, Hailey, and Rachel got to blow out the candle together. The day that Hannah died, the kids asked about her birthday and still wanted us to have cake.

Also her Hannah's birthday and Christmas we got presents for a 3 yr old girl on the Giving Tree. We got her an outfit and a Princess Sophia present. I plan on this being a tradition for our family. This way we can give a present to Hannah and have it benefit a little girl in town.

So with that, it comes back to what do we do for her 1 year? Do we do balloons for this one too? All the memories are written in the Hannah books and my kids don't really have a lot of memories to share on the spot. When something comes to them they share it at that moment, they don't wait for a special day to talk about her (which I think is wonderful). I did make a smaller Hannah book which the kids got for Christmas. I think it would be great to read that one to them every year. Also I love flowers so maybe we'll just do flowers at the year anniversaries and balloons on half years or birthdays.

Part of me wants to do some kind of activity like bowling or planting flowers or a service project. I have great memories of bowling with Hannah and she seemed to enjoy doing that a lot. Also she liked playing in the water so maybe swimming would be great. We were giving a rose plant that we replanted in our garden out front. It means a lot to me and the kids enjoyed taking turns watering it. It would be too cold to plant a flower in April but we could start a seed or bulb inside then replant it later.

Hannah was just joy to be around. She was always very happy. I don't want a day set aside to remember her to be a sad one but a time to enjoy and remember the wonderful spark she was in our family. I want us to focus on looking forward to being together again then spending the day wishing she was still with us. I love Hannah and I love talking about her. I think about her everyday but sometimes feel like I kill conversations when I talk about her because other people don't know what to say or how to react to it. It seems more "acceptable" to talk about her on special occasions which is why I look forward to these anniversaries and birthdays.