Today. Lately.

So, I haven't blogged in a week! For no particular reason other than I have just been up to other things. Then, today feels like I should write something but I don't know what. Ezra turned ten months old yesterday and there is a post coming on that - I attempted some photos of him last night. Let me just say. . . mobile Ezra is not easy to photograph in a planned kind of way. He's quick, that little booger, and he loves to be outside where I hardly let him just down on the ground. There's so much to write about him, but this is not the post. Today I just want to make mention that it has been one year since the passing of my Papa Joe. My sister wrote a post on her blog where she has been documenting their travels and move into their RV.

Last year, after he died I wrote this post to try and formulate my feelings and thoughts and roll them all into one. So, I'd love if you'd read it again or for the first time in his memory. We still talk about him as if he was here yesterday and I am still taken aback a little when I consciously think about him not being here. Mostly when I visit his house and see my grandma. He was such a constant in my life.

Jonah still asks about him. Seeing him and visiting heaven. It's so hard to explain death and heaven. Death is bad when you are worried about them getting hurt (or hurting someone else) but it's good when heaven is involved as a good and wonderful place where there are people that we love. It's hard to explain. Recently, Jonah asked me so randomly as we were driving in the car if maybe sometime we could see Papa Joe in heaven and because these types of questions have been fairly frequent over the past year I simply said "one day, when our time here on earth is done" but you know three year olds...sometimes that let it end there and sometimes you have to explain that that will be a long long time from now and it's just hard to explain. I want to talk about him and remember him, but for Jonah his death has been a lesson in dying and heaven. We don't actually spend that much time talking about Papa Joe himself, but we will. We will tell Ezra all about him and I will tell Jonah all the stories he was not old enough to remember.

This past Sunday I went out to my grandparent's home to take senior portraits for my cousin's daughter, Kelsey. We spent time outside in all the places that hold all those memories I talked about in that post last year and we visited with my grandmother, who is a rock by the way. Kelsey, was gifted Papa Joe's snake skin boots and she wore them for photos and it was pretty awesome. Just like her. You can see some previews I posted for her on my Gray Mornings Photography Facebook Page.