Fennessey Family Halloween weekend :)

Ok so yesterday got crazy busy so I didnt blog but I have to update on hubbys bday! it was a big success! the cannoli cake turned out great!! :) 

Chloe had a great time helping me and get the presents ready and Liam was fascinated by the cake covered in candles! Can't wait to see how he reacts to his 1st birthday cake which will only be 5 short months from now! Its crazy how fast the time goes by... just a little past his 1st birthday and we will be saying good bye to the Army life and hello to NY and our families again! 

before I go on I have to say thanks for the support from all my friends and everyone that said something to me about my previous post. It was hard for me when I was writing about my mom but I think it really helped and I needed that! The support and encouragement from everyone means a lot to me. I want to post my 101 in 1001 list soon and reconnecting with my mom is something I put on it...even if reconnecting just means taking the first step in writing to her....

Yesterday was a great day! I found out in the morning that I didnt have to work which was a nice break and it was just me and my kiddos all day long :) I very much enjoy days like that! It was also payday which who doesnt love pay day..haha.. Chloe was supposed to have dance class but she asked not to go so that we could make it to trick or treating downtown, so I let her skip it and we waited for daddy to get home and then it was off to downtown to meet her "bf" LOL Chloe's bf Robert, or husband as she sometime likes to call him will end up in our stories ALOT. She loves him and we are pretty fond of the whole family so we spend alot of time together! :) :) They will def be missed alot once we move away from here! Trick or treating was fun I love downtown Fayetteville and all the stuff they do, there is always something going on, the festivals, parades and fun stuff for the kids makes fayetteville not such a bad place to live. and of course dinner at Beef O'Bradys after was delicious!! 

Of course fun times can always be brought to an end with sadness... on the drive home my sister called and told me that my poppop would be coming home from the hospital on Saturday. That was great until she said they are bringing him home to a hospital bed in the living room and will have hospice nurses coming in to help keep him comfortable...I heart fell into my stomach! I've known that this could have been coming for a long time now but I'm not ready for any of it. My poppop had a stroke in the spring of last year, hip replacement surgery over the winter and has had many problems that have been found since then. Now his liver and kidneys are failing and making his heart and lungs work too hard. Because my mom was absent in our lives my poppop and mommom have always been such a huge part of it. They live about a 2 min drive away from my dads house..poppop would get us on and off the school bus each day, if we were sick and needed to stay home from school we were at poppops house, alot of vacations and trips we did together, they are more than grandparents to me! Almost every major event in my life up until now, they have been apart of, they even traveled down here this past May for my college graduation!!
I picture and always will see my poppop as the tall strong man that would throw us around in the pool over the summer or go to hershey park and ride all the roller coasters with us! Or pulling in the drive way, seeing the ladder on the side of the house and poppop up on the roof fixing it again. I want to go to PA soon... and I'm going to I just need to figure it out and soon! 

Well now I suppose its time to get back to the trick or treaters... Chloe has been taking care of the door and each time someone comes she's like come on mom lets go!! we open the door and she hands out the candy to all the kids! In cumberland county where we live, they have trick or treating tonight and tomorrow in hoke county (which is right down the road) they have it, so tomorrow we will be going Robert's house to go trick or treating together! Chloe is sooooo excited! :) 

Hope everyone has a Happy Halloween! and a good rest of the weekend! 

Until next time... :)

Let's get this started..

Well where do I begin...who am I?
the things that define me the most and mean the most to me in my life- I'm mom to 2, my little princess and my little man <3 wife to the love of my life, the daughter of a father of 6, the big sister to 5, a godmother, an aunt and a best friend :) 

All of these roles and people play a large part in my life and my life wouldn't be the same without any of them..

Today just so happens to be my husbands birthday... the love of my life is 25 today :) halfway to 50 is what I've been telling him haha...and what makes this day even more special is that we get to celebrate it together! You might think that sounds crazy... you get to celebrate your husbands birthday with him.. well of course thats how it should be but it hasn't been like that for us. Sean and I have been together since he was 19. Birthday 20, 21, 23, and 24 he was deployed for so being home for the big TWO FIVE is just another reason to celebrate!! :)

My 4 year old LOVES birthday's! She gets sooo excited when she hears about someone's birthday that she wants to plan a party, go shopping for presents, make cake. etc... she wants anything and everything that is birthday related. This morning as soon as she woke up she came into my room yelling mom today its daddy's birthday we have to get things started. So we started out by making Sean a surprise breakfast. He had physical therapy class this morning so would be coming home first before having to go back to work. As daddy got home breakfast was served along with a card, Chloe made for daddy :) 
The rest of this day is filled with other surprises. Chloe helped me to wrap the presents, bake a special canolli cake which I pray comes out perfectly! I've never made it before but Sean requested this for his bday cake and he claims that he hasn't had cannoli cake since before he came into the Army so I sure hope it tastes good!! We will see...


Along with birthdays come the mail... birthday cards from family. My gram, who is my grandmother on my mother's side of the family sent a package which we received in the mail yesterday. It included a birthday card for Sean from her but also a birthday card and letter to him from my  mother and a letter for me. Not many people know about  my mom or ever hear me talk about her. She has done so much wrong in my life and in hers that I havent seen her in about 6 years due to the awful things that she has done to me m my family and herself that then put her in jail. the majority of memories I have of my mom are bad. She left when I was 6 years old. After she left it was just my dad, me, my 2 sisters and my brother. It was hard. Growing up at times was very miserable. And luckily we had mommom and poppop (dads parents) less then 5 minutes away!
Every time mom showed up it was brief and it was great until it got bad and then she was gone. Or she would say she was going to take us for the weekend and we'd be waiting out in the front yard riding bikes and playing and she would never show. It was hard for my dad to raise us on his own esp with no financial support from her, it was hard for all of us to not have a mom around and when she was around things always turned out bad. It was even harder having to grow up earlier than anyone else I know, and help take care of my younger siblings at age 6.

After things got really bad we all stopped calling her mom and referred to her as Donna. Donna has been in prison so many times that at this point I've lost count. They were mostly minor things, like not paying child support and not showing up to court.. One time she ran off to FL and lived there with one of her bf's and when she came back she went in. Things got worse as time when on. She went in when I was 16 because while she taught me to drive she stole my debit card, deposited empty envelopes into the account and then made withdrawls. By the time I found out and the bank caught wind of what was going on, there were thousands of dollars negative. I had to press charges against my mom in order to fix it all otherwise I would have been held responsible for it all. She didn't stay in long because although she was charged with over 60 accounts of fraud, it was her first offense and she was let out on time served. After that I didn't see or hear much about her until July 2005.

July 1st, 2005 Sean and I were married... about a week later I moved to NC and a few days after that I sent my husband off on our first deployment to Afghanistan. A few weeks later my sister calls and tell me to check out the local news website back home and sure enough my mom is one of the top stories. Again she is in trouble and this time it's even worse and now she is in prison and has been there ever since. Each time she is there she's always written letters and each time they seem to say the same thing over and over again.. she's sorry, she will change things and make things better next time... almost 20 years of apologies and I can't find myself to forgive her yet. Her letters seem so fake to me. I want the truth I want to know what's real! I don't want to hear that you love me and your sorry and you think about me all the time.

But you know I do hope that she thinks about me all the time. I hope that she thinks about all of us all the time. I hope she thinks about how she missed out on all 4 of her children's high school prom's and graduation. I hope she thinks about how she missed out on her first child's wedding, the birth and enjoyment of her 4 grandchildren, her first child's college graduation, her only son's basic training graduation and so much more! I hope that she realizes that because of the mistakes that she made and the choices she's made in her life that at this time none of us can ever see having a future with her. There was one time in the past 5 years that I really wished she was different and it was as I laid in the hospital the day after the birth of my beautiful baby girl. I just laid there alone looking at my baby. It was hard, my husband was in Iraq and I was all alone. I had the support of some friends during labor but after that it was just me and miss Chloe. That was a time where I thought I wish I had my mom. And not the mom that I have but the mom I remember. The mom she use to be when I was little. That read me storied and tucked me in at night. The mom that showed her love and didn't destroy everything. My sister and I each have 2 children, which now makes her the grandmother to 1 girl and 3 boys. And we are completely unsure of how to go about the explanation of their grandmother. 


My daughter asked me last year if I had a mommy. She said to me, "mommy I love you so much and I love grandma so much and grandma is daddy's mommy so do you have a mommy too?" it broke my heart to hear that question and wonder what to say. I told her the partial truth for now. Or the truth that she could understand at the time. I told her I did have a mommy but she did some bad things so the cops put her in jail. And she said to me, "momma thats terrible, I hope she is a good mommy one day" I always hoped for that too. There were many times that even though I knew I had a pretty sucky mom I just hoped and prayed that one day she would straighten her life out and we could be a family... I don't know if we'll ever get to that point.. and I'm not sure that I even want to. My husband thinks that some day it might be a possibility. He knows that I have a big heart but I'm not sure if its big enough to let all that hurt in again. I've had my guard up with her and I think I always will. 
This is the first time in a long time that I have thought about all of this and talked about it all. I think the new letter from her just brought everything back to me again. And I even considered writing to her. I don't know where I would begin but I've really considered it and still am... all because of a birthday card and a letter...sure makes you think.


Well I suppose that is all for my first blog esp now that I hear my son is up from his nap and its time to frost the cannoli cake... there is much more to come and I really hope to keep up with this!


I have a few new projects I am working on, my new blog included 
1. Chloe and Liam's baby books
2. "That's What She Said"- a collection of Chloe's phrases from the next year 
3. 2011 Yeakley Family Calendar
4. 101 in 1001 list.... was inspired but someone I know that is doing it too
all of these on top of working on my Christmas shopping 
and being a Thirty-One Gifts consultant


Wish me luck!