The Daily Hailey

I’m not sure if its something people do, but we brought our little brood to a funeral today. I mentioned earlier this week that a dear friends brother had passed last weekend, and there was no question that I wanted to attend his funeral. It became clear to me very quickly that it was important that we all go together, whether it was conventional or not.

Through the week, I’ve hit Value Village a couple of times, trying to assemble things for the kids to wear. We regularly attend church, so the kids have some dress clothes, but I thought it would be good to get them a bit more dressed up than usual. Not imperative, but it just seemed like a good choice. I picked up the missing pieces literally YESTERDAY, and everything was washed and ready to go for this afternoon. Call me tacky if you must, but MAN those kids looked cute!! My attempts at pictures of them were kind of hilarious…

Photo bomb!!

Here’s a better one of Dekker, anyway. His posed pictures always look so tense 🙂 He looks so soft and sweet here.

Laela deemed that she and I were twins because we both had dresses. I’ll take it.

Ro cried and cried when we dressed him. The outfit he was amped about the day before no longer was acceptable. Until I told him he could ditch the tie. I don’t actually think the tie was what was upsetting him, but he seemed content to meet me halfway, and he looked fly anyway.

Solly was also kind of miffed about pictures. This was his scoffing face at Brady when he tried to make a joke to encourage Solly to smile.

Group pictures turned out like this. I’m not even kidding. This was the BEST one.

No denying they’re cute, though!! Lol!

So we took their fancy little selves and drove to the funeral this afternoon. Once we had parked, we had a good solid pep talk about how funerals were pretty serious, and pretty sad. We told them we knew they might not understand everything and maybe even be a bit bored, but that we would really like them to try to sit still and quiet, because again, lots of people were sad and remembering the person who died. They all grasped the concept and promised to try their best.

And guys, they actually did alright! The two older ones were a bit twitchy but overall sat quietly and patiently. The little boys were trickier, and took more work to keep reminding them to be quiet, but they actually did better than I anticipated. We didn’t have to remove one kid once!! It helps that we had people we know sitting in front of us and behind us! It was a beautiful service, filled with love and memories and hope. I was thrilled to see so many people from school and our local churches in attendance. I hope the family felt honoured and supported.

There was food after, but our kids had been so still and calm for so long, we knew it was time to let them loose again. And by “loose,” I mean into their car seats in the van, lol! I wanted to go hug the family, and Brady offered to just take the kids out to the van, but Ro mentioned he wanted to see them, too. And that was really the whole point – to bring our whole family in a show of support and love. So we walked our group through the crowd and found our friend. We had a quick hug and visit, but hauled out pretty quickly, as we were obviously not the only people there to speak to her.

I’m glad we went. I hope we didn’t disrupt too many people, but it felt very important to go.

Our evening plan consists of sweatpants and a lazy light supper of english muffins and veggies. Anyone else planning for the same kind of wind down? I hope so!