Our grief counselor/therapist suggested we write this out and put it on our blog for people to read so that people would know how to be of help to us. So here goes. I have a hard time asking people for help of any kind, it has not been my thing at all. In this situation it has been especially difficult. Hopefully this helps to clarify what is good for us and what is not. This also should not take away from the massive outpouring we have gotten from a lot of people. Some people have been amazing and I hope that they know who they are.

This is how we think you can be of help to us if you want to be.

*Realize that to everyone else it has been almost 6 months since Lila died but to us it sometimes feels like it has been 6 days.

*We only want to be around people who can talk about Lila or hear us talk about her. Say her name, ask us questions about her, just listen if we bring her up. Talking about her does not always make us sad, its actually what we prefer to be doing. If you think about her, tell us. If you have a dream with her in it, tell us. If you see a baby you think she looked like, tell us, though she was probably cuter anyway. Just the fact that you thought about her is great for us to hear because it means that Lila is not forgotten and it tells us that she matters in this world. It is more upsetting to us if you do not mention her.

*Text, call, write us an email, send us a piece of mail, send us a message on Twitter, come over if you live near by. Anything. Doing something, no matter how small, goes such a long way. We may not always answer the phone if we are having a bad day, but we know that you called. If you dont have our address, just ask.

*Keep sending us the Lila stone pictures. If you dont have a stone, ask us and we will send you one. If you lost yours, just ask for a new one. We want to mail them out to you. The pictures help us to see that people are thinking of her. Even if you think your Lila stone is in a place we wouldnt care about, just send a picture. Yeah we want all of the states, but we really want to see where the Lila stones are in everyday life too.

*Ask anyone who has been around us, we are not unapproachable. We can go out to dinner and have conversations like anyone else. Just ask how we are doing. It goes a long way.

*If you have not done anything and do not know what to do that would help us, do something. Avoiding us is the worst thing to do, especially if you care about us and Lila. We need it more than you can imagine. Even if you have been missing in action for weeks, it doesn't take much to just send us a text message and shed some light on our usually gloomy day.

*Don't assume in the future that if we ever have another child that our life will be fixed. Lila will always be missing. Any other child will always be missing their big sister.

*Try to remember that we have been completely traumatized by this situation. We did not see it coming, we never had any clue that something was going to go wrong until the minute that Lila was born. Even then they told us that she would be going home and that she might just be "bad at math." Then we were told she was going to die. This has been the worst kind of experience anyone can deal with. If our actions dont make sense to you, dont judge us, they don't really make sense to us either. We are not the same people we were before this happened. We just want our baby back. We are trying to figure this out ourselves.

*We are overly sensitive right now, so just keep that in mind.

This picture is from the day we found out that Lila was going to be a girl