Stupid Spammers

I have recently been getting a lot of spam in the comments. Stupid spammers, don't you know that I (and I'm sure a lot of other bloggers) monitor their comments and delete your messages as soon as possible, and then we report you??

If you see a comment that looks suspicious, do not click on any link in the comment. Most of the ones I have been experiencing list the name as a number of Asian language characters (Chinese? I have no idea) and then the comments are short and pointless and have a bunch of periods after them. The comments are links to some sites (who knows what...I don't want to know) and they want you, dear readers, to click on them and give their sites traffic. And if you click on the name it takes you to their blog where more links will take you to these sites.

So, be careful, don't click on these links!

In the meantime, I think I will go ahead open up comments so that anyone (not just registered blogger users) can comment, but I will require that they be approved before they post publicly. So from now on anyone can comment, but just be aware your comments won't appear until I approve them.

Thanks!

And I promise pictures of what we've been up to the last little while are coming soon. We've been having so much fun!!!

Holding our baby tight

A couple of days ago I noticed a friend of mine on Facebook had posted a link to a blog and commented that she was praying for the family of Layla Grace, "an angel being called home too soon". For those of you not familiar with Facebook, people regularly write "status updates" that may say anything from something about their family to what they ate for dinner. If you are friends with that person, their update will appear in a list that you see when you log into your account.

Anyways, for some reason I remembered seeing that link and yesterday while Emmy and Charles took a nap I went back to my friend's page and clicked on it. Then I sat there and read Layla Grace's story and cried my eyes out. She is two years old and has sage four neuroblastoma, an aggressive "monster" of a cancer, her family calls it. In late January her parents found out that the tumors were not better following months of massive chemo and a bone marrow transplant, but in fact there were more tumors. The doctors gave Layla Grace two months, but months turned into weeks.

I know people who have lost babies and children. I know people who have suffered other terrible tragedies. Just a few days ago two of our friends mourned with friends of theirs the sudden and tragic loss of their eight year old daughter (named Emmie) in a car accident. I read with pain about Haiti and the recent quake in Chile, not to mention the terrible suffering people here in our own country endure on a daily basis. All this to say, I hear about those things and I pray and cry and I wonder why. But for some reason, this story of Layla Grace has stayed with me long after I've closed the computer.

I cannot stop thinking about her parents, who are as I write this are sitting beside her bed at home in Texas watching her die. She is hours, if not minutes, away from leaving them. I cannot even imagine, especially after watching her suffer through painful treatments for nine months. Yet their strength and their faith they write about utterly amazes me.

I don't know, maybe it's because there's something about the shape of Layla Grace's face I saw in photos on the blog that reminds me of Emmy. There are a couple of faces I see her making that I thought "So cute, Emmy makes a face like that!" Maybe it's the way her parents have shared her story and the honesty with which they write about their precious daughter's struggle, I don't know, but I cannot stop thinking about this family.

Social media continues to amaze me. I don't know this family, I seriously doubt I would ever meet them in the future, but I have been thinking of them and saying a prayer for them since yesterday, not to mention following their story on Twitter. I don't "tweet" but it's possible to read people's Twitter comments (sort of like perpetual Facebook status updates!) and so I know what they have most recently said is happening. They mentioned on their blog that they first started the blog and the twitter page as a way to keep their friends and family regularly updated. They said returning all the calls and text messages they were receiving was draining, and I can imagine! But the one person shares the site with another person and soon they have over 25,000 people following their story on Twitter. That's a lot of prayers and caring people, for sure!

So, in this age of "newfangled" technology, I am moved in ways I couldn't imagine, hurting for these people I've never met. And I'm watching my healthy nine month old baby girl happily playing on the floor and I'm hugging her a little tighter.

Books

I love to read. I don't do it nearly as often as I should, mainly because when I get into a book I will often do nothing but read, staying up until all hours of the night and ignoring all housework. But, I do enjoy reading so much!

We have been reading to Emmy since before she was born. I used to read out loud to my belly on occasion and we read her all the books that we were given before she arrived. We read to her every day and she is acquiring quite the library! Currently we read a lot of board books because she likes to rip at the pages or chew on them, so the board books are less destructible. I think I read I Love you Through and Through (a gift from Jasper) about a dozen times on our trip to Birmingham. She loves that book! Emmy even reads in the bathtub...Barnyard Bath is water safe and so cute! Here she is reading Yummy, Yucky, which Lilly gave to her last weekend.

Emmy has been in Kindermusik for a couple of weeks now, and she even pays attention during story time each week, so I'm thinking it's time to checkout story time at the library, too. We both hope she grows up to love to books and reading.

So, I was excited to see on another blog that I like to read (Becoming Sarah) that the author is starting a literacy campaign, which will include weekly giveaways of children's books, hopefully for a full YEAR!
Anyways, I think it's a fabulous idea to promote literacy, and who doesn't like free books? So, I'm posting this to link to her blog so if you're interested you can check out her information and leave a comment to be entered to win a children's book! This week's book looks adorable.