What will it be?

I've been reading a book recently called "Great With Child: Reflections on Faith, Fullness, and Becoming a Mother." It's basically the journaling of an English professor who is expecting her third child. She's a great writer, and she's a Christian, though I doubt I agree with her on some of the finer points of theology. As we're getting closer to finding out the sex of this baby, I found that I really identified with one of her journal entries. I'll type in some of it for you to read.

"We did want to know the baby's sex, mostly for practical reasons. I wanted to sort out all my boxed up baby clothes ahead of time. And I admitted to myself that I liked the idea of having another girl, so it would probably be better to know ahead of time if the baby was not going to wear all those darling little dresses I had saved. But I thought I would be truly happy with a normal baby either way. Then the sonographer said, "It's a boy." Well, well. How full of pretense our little maternal pieties can be. Yes, I was relieved that all the parts were in the right place. Yes, it was wonderful to see the actual baby moving about on the screen...But it was his hand and his mouth. And my relief was eclipsed by disappointment. This is a very unattractive confession. But it's true. I suddenly realized how much I had planned on a girl. I had imagined holding a little girl's hand, I had thought of my daughter with a little sister...But this is not to be. Period. This baby is a boy, and that changes everything."

Of course, Debra Rienstra goes on to say that she begins to fall in love with the idea of having another son. Of course, she loves her new son deeply. But I did think her total honesty about the big shock was really great. I sometimes feel an unspoken expectation on me as a first time mom to say when others ask if I want a girl or a boy that I really don't care as long as it's healthy. But how many people truly have no preference? From the beginning, I've honestly hoped for a little girl. I'm sure I don't have good or rational reasons for this. I'm a girl, so the idea of raising someone who has girl parts and a girl mind feels a little more comfortable to me. I don't understand guys nearly as well as I'd like to. But I have worked with little boys as a preschool teacher, and a lot of them are such cuddlers, and I have a darling nephew that I adore, so the idea of having a boy sounds better all the time, too, even if it does feel more like uncharted territory. I guess I wonder how many people out there didn't think of their baby as one sex or the other before they knew what it was. From early days, I've been imagining this baby as a girl. It doesn't hurt that my mom, my mother-in-law, my brother, etc., are all sure this baby is a girl too. Won't God have a good laugh on us if we're wrong? But I wonder if most moms do put some sort of sex on their baby imaginings just because it's natural to do that. We don't like to think of Baby as an "it," maybe? One of the reasons I want to know the sex of this baby soon is because I don't want to be thinking of the baby as the wrong sex until it comes out, and be totally shocked if all my imaginings are wrong. I want to get my thinking adjusted ahead of time. Will I be disappointed if the ultrasound tech says, "It's a boy."? I honestly don't know. Maybe Isaac's sweet face will come to my mind, and I'll smile and think that I've been silly to indulge my vivid imagination with girl fantasies. Maybe I'll start dreaming right away of little boy hugs. I don't know; I'm caring a little less every day whether I have a girl or a boy. But I am grateful to Debra Rienstra for being brave enough to say the things I've been thinking were possibly motherly inappropriate and making them seem a little more normal. She's helped me to smile and cut myself a little slack in this area.

DC living...

Hey, everybody. I thought I'd post this picture because I think it's pretty funny. This is the sign you see when you walk onto "the Highest Court in the Land." That's what everyone at the Supreme Court calls the basketball court located above the real highest court in the land. Yes, the Supreme Court has a basketball court. It also has a gym and a weight room. Since the b-ball court is located literally directly above the court court, this sign is necessary. Apparently somebody started bouncing the ball, 9 justices and everybody below listening to oral arguments heard it, and marshals swarmed upstairs to stop the unauthorized playing. I would've hated to be that guy! This post is going to be some random musings about what it's like living in the Nation's Capitol for those of you living in suburbia. It really hard to describe exactly what living in a large city is like if you've never done it, but I thought I'd try. It's really the daily things that are different. I think it all boils down to resources being more scarce, things like parking, and land, and everything else, and having a ton more people using them. That's probably the thing that defines all the little things that are different. You have to accomodate the most people with the resources you have, so that means that nothing is quite as easy for any one individual person. For example, our apartment complex has three 17-story buildings. There are thousands of people living here. So where do all those people park? They park in a huge parking lot behind the building, and they're thrilled to always have a guaranteed space, even if it means they have to walk a couple of blocks through the parking lot to get to their building if they get back late and all the close spaces are full. This is in contrast to apartments in Birmingham or Greensboro, where you could park your car right outside the front door to your building. You might have to walk 20 feet to get to your own front door. The parking situation necessitates something you might never have thought of: the need for a good way to get your groceries across a couple of blocks of parking lot, down a long corridor, and up an elevator to your apartment without collapsing or having to make multiple trips. Enter the foldable metal cart! This is an essential tool of city living here. David and I looked around a lot to make sure that we found the perfect one, big enough for all the weekly groceries at once, able to roll laundry down to the laundry room in one trip, small enough to fold up and fit in our hall closet. After much searching, we got the perfect one at Bed Bath and Beyond, and it's been a lifesaver ever since. You may think that wheeling this thing around would make you look like a bag lady, and it sort of does, but everybody else looks like a bag lady, too, so you can all look homeless together. We haven't minded downsizing to fit all our things into this smaller apartment. At this point, it really doesn't look crowded, and we have a fabulous view. We've also found that we can live with a lot less stuff than we thought we could, and it's nice to simplify from time to time. The only problem with our little place is the steep price for living 40 minutes by Metro from downtown DC. It costs a lot to live here in this one-bedroom apartment, significantly more than what most of you are paying on your mortgage for a 3-bedroom, 2 bath house. If we stay in this area, we wouldn't make this a long term solution to housing. But where do you go in a city where housing prices are through the roof? For example, we know of a townhouse in Arlington about 10 minutes from us that recently sold for $450,000. A normal house, nothing fancy, with a small yard would probably sell for close to a million dollars. Living where we are now is not affordable long term on one income, so we'd have to go further out. A lot of people in our church live further out, and if they work in DC, it may take them over an hour to get to work, one way. On the plus side, DC living is never dull. So many interesting people live here that it's easy to meet up with others that share your quirky interests. They've come here to do really neat things, like work at the Justice Department or do contract work for the Pentagon or be a lawyer for the Patent Office. A lot of them love to talk about politics more than they love to talk about sports, and that's a huge plus for David. =) It's a town full of people who love to converse about interesting ideas, political, social, and economic ideas. There is always something going on, and a lot of times, it's free. You can go to hear any of the Armed Forces bands, visit any of the Smithsonians, wander around any of the Memorials, take in any of the numerous festivals on the National Mall, and it won't cost you a penny. That's good, because you may not have many pennies left over after you pay your rent and groceries, but you might not notice because there's always something new to discover. =) Oh, and if you like ethnic food, this is the place to be. Birmingham seemed to have more good, cheap Mexican restaurants, but you can easily find good Indian, Thai, Chinese, Ethiopian, Mongolian, Cuban, Persian, Lebanese, Vietnamese, Korean, etc., etc., food here everywhere for about what it would cost you to go to Applebees. David and I don't eat out much, but when we do, we know we'll find something neat to try. I hope maybe that gave you some small idea of what it's like to live in this area. If you want a better idea of it, come and visit! The couch bed is open, and we'll put a mint on your pillow.

Fear not...

At this point, I've gotten far enough along in my pregnancy that I'm starting to worry about a new variety of things. =) For the first four months, I blissfully concentrated on dreaming about baby clothes and strollers and Baby Bjorns, etc. Of course, I'm still doing that. I purposefully put all thoughts of actual labor and delivery out of my mind. I think I'll hold off on thinking about labor as long as possible. Who needs to worry about all that until the labor class, right? In the beginning, I worried that I wouldn't keep this baby. That kept me too busy to worry about the health of the baby. =) Well, now I'm fighting worrying about that. I wake up to go to the bathroom several times a night now, and one night recently, I lay awake worrying before I went back to sleep. Our big ultrasound is coming up soon, and though I'm excited about finding out if we're having a boy or a girl, I'm also afraid of this ultrasound. I actually scheduled it a few days later than I had to because I want to live in ignorance as long as possible if there is something to fear. I'm worry that we'll get there and find out that something is horribly wrong. I imagine them coming in and saying, "I'm sorry. Your child doesn't seem to have a brain." Maybe this sounds farfetched, but I got an email from a friend asking for prayer for her friends that found just that when they went to their ultrasound. I guess the last couple of years have involved so much bad news for us that I am afraid to believe that there could finally be a happy ending. The bad news mindset is a tough thing to uproot when you've mostly had bad news about pregnancy for a good while. Maybe this is common for all mothers, though. Maybe they all struggle with worry about this, and my experience is totally normal. David and I talked about this last night for awhile, and as always, my laidback, trusting, non-worrying husband's advice was what I needed to hear (even though his calmness is a little annoying at times=). David is peaceful, and he thinks this baby is probably healthy. But he also knows that we have no guarantees of anything in this life. Our new church is Reformed, so they talk more than we're used to about God's sovereign will in your life. If there is one thing we understand, it's that God's sovereign will for your life may involve some tough struggles. There isn't anything you can do about it. David told me that I needed to give up the idea that my life should go perfectly smoothly and not have big difficulties. If I give that up, he said, I'll be a lot more likely to relax and accept whatever God has planned for me, no matter what it is. I asked him if he knew anybody who'd truly given up wishing for a happy, stress-free life without problems. I want to meet them if he has! But he's right that we should be striving to let go of that idea. I guess all of the Christian life involves constant attempts to lay that desire for our own happiness down at the foot of the cross. Not that we shouldn't be joyful and happy in the Lord and thankful for the gifts that He's given. He'd be insulted if we weren't thankful and happy for His blessings. But I know that my own happiness and a life of ease is too much of a goal in my life. I should be just as happy if He sends rain as sunshine, but I'm glad that He knows that I'm clay, and He understands when I really struggle to feel that way about it. We will go for our ultrasound, and everything will probably be fine, and I'll post what we're having on this blog. And I'll keep remembering this verse that the Lord brought to my mind lately. I memorized it in the King James version when I was a little girl, and I don't have time to find the reference right now, but it goes something like this: "Fear not. Be thou not dismayed, for I am thy God. I will strengthen thee. I will help me. I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness." He will uphold me. He will strengthen me. No matter what life and parenting challenges the future holds, there is nothing greater than sitting in my Father's strong right hand.

A new job...for me?

I got a job! Yes, I'm just that excited about it. I've been looking for two weeks, and though I know that isn't that long, I was beginning to think that acquiring a job this time around might be a hopeless proposition. A temping I would go perhaps....so I know that God got me this job. David and I did some thinking about what kind of job would be best for me at this point. I got my M.A. in History right before we left Birmingham, and before we found out I was pregnant, we thought I'd take that museum experience that I had from when we lived here before and try to find a nice history related job with one of the numerous historic sites and museums in this area. Getting pregnant changed those plans in an instant. =) Now I knew I was going to be looking for something I could quit in January without anyone getting too angry with me. I had two years of teaching in a private, Christian preschool under my belt, and it was such a sympathetic atmosphere for pregnant women and moms that this seemed to be the way to go again. So I dug out the phone book and started calling preschools. I think I must've called about 25 of them, checking their addresses on Mapquest and hunting up their websites to make sure they weren't too far away and that they offered a normal school day schedule. I emailed resumes; I fielded phone calls. I found that most of them were fully staffed for the fall. I also found that my honesty about my pregnancy was creating a problem for me. I can't really blame these directors; after all, they'd have the trouble of finding somebody to replace me when my time comes. I don't know that I'd want to hire me right now, either. But it was still discouraging. I had a couple of interviews, and even though I'd told them about my pregnancy over the phone, and they had still wanted to meet me, I could tell that it only started to sink in to them once they started talking to me that I would probably be leaving in January. I appreciated the bluntness of one director I spoke with, though it was a little hard to take. She said on the phone, "Well, this is a one year contract. What are you going to do with the baby?" I figure that she said what most of them were thinking. So by the time the end of last week rolled around, I was figuring it'd be a miracle if anyone hired me. On Thursday, I got a call out of the blue from a director I hadn't even called. She'd gotten my name from another director in the local preschool association, and her school was one of the closest, 15 minutes away in Mclean. She wanted me to come in for an interview, and even though she recognized I'd probably be leaving after the baby came, she said that she'd have time to find someone else. She's a lovely woman, very warm and friendly. To top it off, she used to work for a obgyn, so she was interested in my pregnancy. So I have a job as a co-teacher in a 2 1/2-3k class on Tuesdays and Thursdays with the option of subbing other days of the week. It may not sound glamorous, but it's what Baby and I probably need, and I'm thankful that God has provided something for me. David said when he came home, "You know, God always provides you with something. You've had two bosses hire you knowing that you were probably only going to be around for a year. Now you've had somebody hire you for 6 months! You've been really blessed with jobs." He's right; I really have. I'm so thankful for it. We have a Father who looks out for us. He is the Great Provider, and I know I've seen multiple miracles in job provision from His hands.

Changing settings..

Note: I am changing my blog so that you have to register in order to post a comment. I have wanted to be able to reply to some of the comments that have been left anonymously, correct incorrect assumptions, thank readers, etc., and have been unable to do so because they were anonymous, so now you hafta register. =)

Surprising feelings...

This is a blog that's been percolating for awhile in my conscious and subconscious. I think it's probably time to talk about how I felt in the first couple of weeks after I found out that I was pregnant with this baby. Enough time has passed that it isn't so raw or bewildering anymore. See, I'd been dreaming and hoping and wishing for the day that I'd find out I was pregnant. This had been going on for three years, so long that I was really afraid to wish or hope or dream much anymore, even though that dream still took up a corner in my heart. I knew what it was like to feel like my most precious dream had come true, rejoice in it with abandon, and then have it dashed because of miscarriage. But I still had the dream there somewhere, and I had this vision of how life would be, and how I would feel if I could just get pregnant. I think somewhere in there, though I'm not sure I admitted it consciously, I thought that if this nightmare would just end, then everything in my world would go back to the way it was before infertility began. I would feel the same way about God that I did before; I would have the same view of the world. Imagine my shock when that didn't happen. Because of the faith that David had against all human reason (see earlier posts for this) that we'd be pregnant in May, I wasn't really all that worried that we'd lose this baby. I don't think that really entered into my feelings a lot at that point. So I was truly surprised when one of the first feelings that I had after shock and surprise was... anger. That's right. I was angry. I was expecting that I'd be very relieved and that I'd be singing songs of joy and thanksgiving to God and thanking Him for this great blessing in my life. I was sure that was how I'd feel. But I didn't feel that way. Instead, I was mad at Him. I thought, "Ok, we're pregnant. I didn't think that was the plan, but it is. So... WHAT WAS THAT ALL ABOUT?!!! You put me through this nightmare for what?" The past three years of pain were on my mind, not the joy I was fully expecting to experience. I felt like a little girl who'd been to the dentist. He'd been drilling on her teeth for hours, and when he was done, he smiled at her, and he handed her a fluffy teddy bear. Did the little girl smile at him? Was she grateful for the bear? No, she took the bear, but he didn't get the big smile he was looking for because she was remembering all the painful hours she'd just spent in the dentist's chair. The gift was nice, but she wasn't too thrilled with the person giving it to her at the moment. All of a sudden, I was having to deal with the fact that God had put me through a lot of pain, not to change the end result, but to delay it for reasons I wasn't finding too compelling at the moment. In my cost/benefit analysis, the costs definitely outweighed the benefits. The experience was still too raw for me to be excited about all the spiritual maturity that I'd hopefully gained through this fiery trial. Nope, I just didn't seem worth it at the time. I think it may take a lot of time and distance for me to see the full worth in it, though that's not the point, since it was worth it to God for some reason. But more than that, I was angry because I wanted to go back to my childhood way of viewing my relationship with God. I think that was really the focal point of my anger. I think many of us who grow up in sheltered Christian homes have a firmly subconscious belief that if we just keep our noses clean, God will put a hedge of protection around us. Nothing truly tragic will touch us unless we sin. For a lot of us, nothing tragic has ever happened to us that we couldn't point to as caused by our own sin. We've experienced lots of life's little bumps, bruises, and inconveniences, but nothing that threw us into a sea of despair and confusion that felt like it would drown us at any moment. We could dutifully and, we thought, truthfully say that we did know that God allowed trouble and hardship in the lives of His people that wasn't because of their sin. We could see examples of this all around us, cancer, war, death, and we knew it was true in our heads, but it hadn't truly hit us in a felt way yet. We hadn't had much experience with it personally. We also had plenty of Biblical examples of this truth, and we could quote them chapter and verse, but their truth didn't sink much deeper than that. Not in any sort of experiential way. So the old unconscious view stayed there, dormant, causing lots of unknown trouble, until the moment when our lives fell apart and there was no one to blame, not even ourselves. No one, that is, but the sovereign God of the universe who allowed this to happen. All of a sudden, the book of Job became a lot more personal. And it hurt. Bad. Because the childhood view of a God who always protected you and only disciplined you with a tap on the wrist was gone forever. In the days after my positive pregnancy test, I mourned its passing. I hadn't realized before then that the last three years had taken it away forever. I didn't want to grow up and face the harsh reality that I really had to embrace God in a different way than I ever had before, a more realistic way that was a lot less comforting and simple than my old view. Sunlight breaking through the storm clouds of infertility could not give me back the old days and the old ways. I was changed forever, older, wiser, and more battered. I know that good will come from having a better experiential understanding of God's disciplining side. It already has. I'm sure that Job knew God better because he experienced boils because that was a part of God's plan for his life. I've truly learned what it means to cling to God in the last few years. The Lord's discipline has been good in my life, and it's also been far more difficult than I ever imagined it would be. The ultimate goal of God's glory in our lives is a tough process for us humans. We say that we're willing to go anywhere, do anything, experience any deprivation or sorrow, to know Him better and if it'll bring His glory in our lives. We sing it; we sometimes pray it. But we don't know what it means until He shows us just a tiny piece of what giving up our heart's desires at His request actually costs. Christianity is not for sissies, and I've been a sissy. =) Still am, actually. But I'm learning. I've learned a little about what it means to praise when He says, "No." I'm re-learning what it means to praise when He says, "Yes." =) I'm learning that my life isn't about me, and I'm learning that going with God's plan and not mine is something that I often don't do until my plan is ripped from my hands. Maybe one day I'll be grown up enough to trust in His ultimate kindness when He tears up my precious treasures for my own ultimate good. I sure hope so. After all, He is God, and I am not, and I have seen His goodness even in darkness. I just need to keep telling that to the little girl with the teddy bear. =)

Belly pictures...

I figured it was time. Time to show off the poochy baby belly! =) Here I am at 15 weeks. I had David take these pictures in the evening because that's when my tummy seems the stretchiest and poochiest. I'm not sure why; maybe all those muscles stretching out during the day? In the bottom picture, I'm still wearing my own low, low rise jeans and a maternity top courtesy of the very generous maternity lending closet of Michele DuVall. In the top picture, I'm wearing a stretchy dress that I've had for years. David thinks this one really shows off Baby, and I figure I'll never get into it again, so hey, why not stretch it out? =) I went through my closet today and took out all the non-maternity things that I know I can't make work for the next several months. I discovered that some of my picks when we moved only a month and a half ago were pretty unrealistic. It was kind of a big deal for me to do this. I'm getting more comfortable and more excited about being a mom every week. I didn't realize how reserved and guarded my emotions were until I began noticing this change in them. I really didn't want it to, but my miscarriage caused me to stuff down my hopes about this pregnancy until the last couple of weeks. I also seem to be hearing a lot horror stories about pregnancies lately; I don't know why anyone thinks it's a good thing to tell those to a pregnant woman, but there you have it. I'm thankful that it's getting easier for me to enjoy this time and dream about the baby.