What I would tell Princess Di....

I don't know about you, but I felt a connection with Princess Diana.  I'm pretty sure we would have been besties.  I got married 2 months before her wedding, and watched her marriage on tv (along with 20 million other people) and just knew they would live happily ever after.

When she gave birth to Prince William, and then I subsequently had Lacey, I just had all these ideas about getting them together.  :)

I thought I could bring some fun into Princess Di's life, and help her through some of her rough stuff, and then I went through some rough stuff, and I still think we would have been best friends.

When she died, I mourned her as hard as I would have mourned a best friend.

Now, she's about to become a grandmother, and if we were best friends, This is what I would tell her.....

1.  You will NEVER be ready for the amount of crazy Love you will feel for this baby.
Oh, everyone told me I would be crazy about my grandbaby, and that grandbabies are the greatest gift on earth, but I just thought that's what they said, Like birthday parties are the funnest things, and the olympics are magnificent.   I wasn't prepared for the overwhelming-ness of love that flowed through my body from the very first second I laid eyes on our baby.

2.  Brush up on your baby talk, because you will use it ALL THE TIME.  

"Oh, hers don't wike dat?"   "Hers wants some more bawbaw?"  "Hers Lolly's Girl"  And it doesn't matter where you are,  target, church, doctors office, governor of Oklahoma... you will talk baby fluently to your grandbaby.

3.  You will stop complete strangers on the street, and tell them about your grandbaby.

It's true.  And if you are like me, you will have small albums of pictures to accompany your speech.  If you have a great story like Laynie's, you will most likely make people in tag agencies cry while they are waiting to get their renewal licenses.  

4.  You would rather cut off your arm than to have to ever see them in pain.  

When Laynie first got sick, Lacey and I would get almost physically sick ourselves watching the doctors try to find a vein to give her her transfusions.  When she was in the hospital, we walked 10 miles a day in the hallways trying to keep her calm, and help her feel better.  One would walk until our hips went out, and we'd hand her off to the other, and walk our 10 miles.  

5.  If God's plan is for you to outlive them, you learn to move on, but your heart is never the same.  
We knew that we would only have this gift a brief time.  We rejoiced in her 1 week birthday, we praised in her one month birthday, we relaxed on her 1 year birthday, and we re-evaluated on her 22 month birthday.  When she was 2 years old, and we knew that time was limited, we full out lived every single second of every single day with this precious gift.  We learned a new sense of compassion, we learned the magnificence of blood donation, we got first hand knowledge of the 10th floor of CHildren's hospital, and what that entails.  And when she received her angel wings, I learned pain in a way I never had felt before.  Yet, I also felt God's grace and peace in a way I had never felt before.

In losing the most precious thing in my life, I found peace in the most valuable thing in my life... giving my life to full surrender to Him, and letting God guide me through the pain.

I would tell my best friend, Princess Diana, that while every day of life is fun and joyful and full of baby talk, and pictures....to never, ever, forget that it's a GIFT.

And small gifts...... are the very, very best ones.