Yay Wisconsin!

Sorry for the delay in posting for the second week in a row, but we flew to Wisconsin yesterday and I was too excited once we got here to sit down and blog - we haven't been here to visit Chad's family in over a year! And since we are visiting, I don't have my computer with me with all of my millions of Haley-Bug pictures on it, so instead I will post a picture of our cutie-pie niece Kylee who we are visiting. :)

Here she is playing with Trip's leash, looking like the ornery little peanut she is! She is a crawling, pulling up, walking while holding onto fingers, cheerios eating, 12-hour sleeping, jibber jabbering machine! I can't believe how much she's changed in the 2.5 months since we last saw her, Melissa and John are lucky people to have such a happy, healthy baby-roo. :)

And speaking of lucky, Kylee is lucky to have healthy, happy parents who love her more than anything too. The other day I was lamenting to my Dad about how it was so frustrating for me to see all those hundreds (and I'm sure thousands) of babies at Children's Hospital who were there all by themselves, all day long, with no one to hold them or visit them. I struggle with moments of rage towards the parents of these children and think that they truly don't deserve them. Why didn't our sweet Haley-bug get to come home with us when we took the best possible care of her we could and spent every minute loving her and praying for her? But those other parents, who don't even visit their babies, just get to show up on discharge day and take home this little baby who probably never or rarely gets the special attention it most likely needs? I think I should get to take those babies home with me, tuck them in my pockets and run away with them. It's just so unfair.

But then, at the end of my tirade, my Dad wisely pointed out that wouldn't Haley rather be a baby who only lived 5.5 months but who was loved ferociously every single second of that time, and who had attention lavished on her and tons of people to love her and pray for her and take good care of her, than be one of those babies who might have gone on to live a long life but who didn't have anyone who loved them enough to even come visit them at the hospital and who probably went home to neglectful environments if not worse? Would you rather live a short but wonderful life or a long and miserable life? And I guess I knew the answer to that, and while I still don't think those people deserve those babies (and I've learned recently that most of those babies are given up for adoption because the people usually don't ever show up to pick them up from the hospital), I now realize that truly I am still luckier than they are and our Haley-Bug was certainly luckier than their sweet babies who are the ones who truly deserve better.