April 2025 has lived up to the April Showers, bring May Flower’s phrase. It feels like it rained all month long. Despite the weather, the show went on. Our April has been filled with track, soccer, flag football, more track, more soccer, and dance.
April 9th marked the one-year anniversary of Autumn’s passing. One of the kids’ teachers put it best, in grief your perspective of time becomes warped, it feels like yesterday, a month ago and so long ago, all at the same time. I was not sure how to mark this anniversary, because in my mind it was not really something I wanted to “celebrate”. But the more I thought about it, the more it became clear, it’s all about perception. While April 9, 2024 was the worst day of my life, it was the best day of Autumn’s life. We are not celebrating her passing, but her birth into eternal life. On that day, this beautiful woman entered the gates of Heaven, healthy, happy, made new and bathing in the glory of God. We started with 6:40AM mass that morning and the kids were not too pleased. This is, until we walked into Church and my mom, dad, Amanda, Lissy, Julie, and the Brawner Crew were sitting there waiting to surprise us. After dropping Finley off at a surprise breakfast her friends through for her, I enjoyed breakfast with them at Autumn’s favorite breakfast restaurant before they all headed back to Kirksville. Throughout the rest of the day, we received flowers, goodies, texts and cards wishing us well. That evening we enjoyed dinner at one of Autumn’s favorite restaurants and then the Brawner’s joined us at the cemetery where we released some yellow balloons and did a champagne and sparkling grape juice toast in Autumn’s honor. It was a peaceful evening, and it was exactly what we needed. Getting the first year behind us lifted a weight off our shoulders. While we will always grieve Autumn, now we know we can still find joy in life while holding grief in our hearts.
Briley has had an April full of track, more track, her birthday, and prom. In track she has focused on improving her mile and two-mile times. While not coming down as fast as she would like (she’ll never be happy), her mile time is improving every race, which is all you can ask for. She has ran the two-mile once and plans on making that her primary area of focus for the remainder of the season. Her big news is that she qualified for the mile race at Kansas Relays, where she got a new PR. Just qualifying is a huge accomplishment, and we are so proud of her. Grandma Julie came into town as on back-to-back days we celebrated Briley’s big 18th Birthday and her Senior Prom. For her birthday she got a trip to Cape-Cod with Aunty Amity (try to top that one), and from us got some new shoes, clothes and her own set of leg air compression boots. I thought this would allow me to take mine back, but Baylor has now claimed them. For prom she went with Alex Meierotto and they looked great together. When shopping for a dress, she wanted to find one that matched her eyes. She succeeded and the results were spectacular…she looked stunning. Big thank you to Aunt Lissy for sending Briley’s hair stylist to our house to do her hair. They had dinner and pictures down at Union Station, followed by Prom at Hilltop. She had a great time!
Baylor has been having 1-2 track meets a week for middle school, plus a flag football game every Sunday. In his first track meet of the season, he blew the doors off his prior PR, and has since improved it in the three races since. He has also ran the 800m once and won that race by a comfortable margin. In the last couple meets, he ran so hard in the mile that he did not feel up to running the 800m, which I am fine with because it means we get to head home and get dinner going. After some initial hesitation, he decided to play one last season of flag football with his team. He is glad he did, and seems to be having the most fun of any season yet. He sees a lot of action on both side of the ball and their team is undefeated. He has also been getting ready for his confirmation, which takes place tonight.
Finley has and her teammates have continued to dominate on the soccer field and are still undefeated on the season. Finley seems to have at least 1 goal a game and does a great job at assisting her teammates on goals. They all try so hard, and genuinely love the sport and love playing together. Lately Finley has been all about dance. She has her dance recital coming up next week where she will dance in four dances. She has been putting a lot of pressure on me to let her do competitive dance next year at a different studio with her friends and I don’t think she has left me with a choice. This girl is like her mother when it comes to her passion for dance, so I need to let her chase it.
Atticus has not been as busy as the other kids, and I am perfectly fine with that. His soccer team is having the opposite luck of Finley’s team and has lost a number of close games. They moved up a division this year, got a handful of new players, so adjusting to all of those changes has been hard. Atticus continues to improve his foot work, shots and corner kicks. He is the teams leading goal scorer and with his speed and footwork, is fun to watch. Outside of soccer, Atticus and his buddies love to scooter around the neighborhoods and play football and basketball at each other’s houses.
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