Happy 4th Birthday Chloe

Mixed emotions today on the anniversary of our baby girls 4th Angel day and also the 1yr Anniversary of the Black Saturday Bushfires and for those that remember we live in one of the effected area's, infact the town was wiped off the map.  But our mind was on her today.

Normally for her anniversary we would go down to the beach and throw in flowers for her but today was different.  We now live in the mountains so have no beach but we do have Stevensons River which flows from the top to the bottom of the mountain so we found a quiet place and threw some flowers in and spoke to her.  We both had a bit of a cry, hugged Maxx and came home.  I still wonder to this day if there was anything that hospital could of done for me, especially knowing the same thing happened when I was having Maxx but they put in a stitch, but at F hospital they didn't even do a scan or a internal to look at anything.

I often wonder what she would look like, would it be like her little brother or different all together.  Would she have the same personality as her mummy (poor daddy) or would she have her own little attitude.  She would be going to kindy this yr and starting school next yr and I think the school bit emotional wise is going to be the heardest thing to deal with.

As I mentioned earlier we also went to the Black Saturday Memorial Service.  Can't believe it's been a year since so many lives changed forever.  We bought up here 3 yrs before the fires, infact we decided after we lost Chloe that this would be the place to change our lives.  Marysville was beautiful, until you saw the place for yourself you can't describe it.  These were some before photos


http://www.travelvictoria.com.au/marysville/photos/


Anyway we had just got Maxx out of hospital at the end of Jan 2008 and as I hadn't seen the house since it was at frame stage, then everything happened and I was hospitalised for 7 weeks before I had Maxx.  So we had decided that on the 7th Feb my parents and ourselves would go for a trip up as it was 2 weeks off handover, but we soon saw the weather was going to be between 43-46 degree's C or 109 - 115degree's F and thought no way are we taking Maxx out in that heat........that little boy could of saved our lives.  Later in the afternoon we left Maxx with my parents and went down to the beach to throw in some flowers for Chloe, when we got home Nathan got a call from one of his team members had left a message on his phones saying that she is safe and had got out....we had no idea what she was talking about until we saw the news......she lived in Kinglake which was an hour away from Marysville.  We got on the CFA ( Country Fire Authority) website to see where the fires were but it was so slow to load or would just drop out.  Eventually we got onto the site thinking all was ok but soon to learn the site was so far behind that Marysville had been burn't down whilst the site was saying all was ok.  All night we were listening to the radio, looking online and listening to the news when Nathan came in as he had been listening to the radio in the car and said Marysville is gone, the whole town is gone, but we just wern't sure as the CFA website said the fire had gone around it.  It wasn't until Nathan got a phone call from a neighbour who had a holiday home next to us and told us the whole town and surounding towns we gone, totally burn't to the ground.  He couldn't tell us if our house was standing as he too decided not to go up there that weekend but had got word from people he knew up there.


We some how found out later down the track that our house had survived but until were were allowed back in 6 weeks later we had no idea.  We we were allowed back in we were in total shock of not only the damage of the town but when we arrived at our house we just stood there in amazement........our house was in one piece with a few broken windows and some bubbling paint but every house around us, on either side of us, behind us all gone.


Someone was watching over us in 2009.