It feels like we are reliving the last few weeks of Sadie's life.  She was really poorly last August and we started to rely more on Francis House for help.  Sadie began to need a feeding tube again as she could not drink her milk without becoming too tired to get enough.  The past few weeks have felt really hard and its clear that the build up to the anniversary will be tougher than I had imagined. It is clear that the grief and sadness will always be there and some days and weeks we manage it all pretty well, but sometimes it sits just beneath the surface and its hard to keep going on those days.  Sadie is just as much our daughter today as she ever was and is still very much in our hearts constantly.  We are always her parents, you just have to learn to parent a dead child differently.  Sounds odd and hard to explain, I know.  I can still feel Sadie lay on my chest.  She wil be there forever.  We still love her as much as ever and always will.  I wish I could explain better.

I look back and think about the past 18/19 months and I am amazed by how much I have changed, by what I have learnt, by the difference in my values, by the amazing people we have met.  Sadie brought wonderful things to our lives.  Sadness, yes, but so many wonderful things.

We have several photos of Sadie smiling at us around our home and Pat always looks at these - we never prompt him in any way but he just loves babbling to these pictures and reaching out to her.  I hope this means he'll learn to love his sister too.

Well I think these next 2/3 weeks as we head towards Sadie's anniversary will be hard so I plan to try and stay active and get plenty of walks in with Pat.  I can't commit to anything during this time as I just don'tseem to know how I am going to feel one day to the next right now, but we'll try to keep busy and hope we won't offend anyone if we have to cancel any engagements if we are feeling particularly low.  I will keep my chin up as much as I can because its so important and I am not going to allow myself to wallow in sadness.

Well... deep breath and we'll carry on and hopefully we'll find that the grief becomes much more manageable after September has passed.