It's a beautiful day in my neighborhood...

I slept really well last night. This is significant. Apparently, you can start to not sleep that well at night kinda early in your pregnancy. I think my sleep has been more light and restless for about 2 weeks now, so when I get a really nice night of sleep, I'm very happy about it. And I did last night, and I woke up refreshed. I wasn't even cranky about my leg being sore from lying on one side all night. And the sun is shining, the birds are singing. It's a great fall day in Arlington. Last night, I went to the Court for a clerk Happy Hour. For those of you who associate Happy Hour with smoky bars and lots of alchohol, that's not what this is. Sure, there's beer, but there's also a full meal, and spouses come and bring the kids, and everybody just hangs out and chats for a couple of hours after work. They happen every Thursday night, but we haven't been able to go to all of them. Last night, it started pouring, so they moved the cookout inside to an extra room used by one of the Justice's. There was a fireplace in there, and somebody lit the wood in it, and we all sat around and talked in this imposing wood paneled room with 17 foot ceilings and floor to ceiling bookshelves. The place to be for me, though, was on the floor near the fireplace with the babies. =) We ended up staying until 8:00 chatting, a little bit because nobody wanted to walk back to the Metro in a downpour, but mostly because it was fun. I met a new spouse, the wife of another clerk, and her son who is exactly Isaac's age, and I really enjoyed it. Somebody offered me a seat on the Metro on the way over there, and that made me feel good, too. At this point, I look really pregnant. I promise I'll post some more pictures soon. And I feel good. I was realizing what a blessing that is this morning. One of the girls I was talking to last night felt bad her entire pregnancy, and it was so miserable, that even though she wants several children, she considers it a negative thing to have to be pregnant with them all. I'm so thankful to God that this pregnancy has been so enjoyable for me. If this is the only pregnancy I have, I'll have good memories of it. At this point, I feel like a fine tuned baby carrying machine. My body is doing what I always hoped it would do if I could just get it there, and it's nice to feel like it's working like it's supposed to work. I'm 23 weeks now, and next week, I'll hit viability. That means that after that, if the baby decides to come early, he could make it. The number 24 is definitely important to me right now. This weekend, we have a couple and their newborn lined up to come to dinner, and I'm going to attempt to make sopapillas for them. I'm crossing my fingers that this Mexican desert won't be too hard. And on Saturday we get to do something I absolutely love and look forward to all year. We're going to the State Fair in Richmond! I love fairs. When we were in Alabama, we went to their state fair in Montgomery. No offense to all my lovely friends in the YellowHammer State, but the Alabama State Fair is a huge disappointment. I was very sad after going there. So I've been deprived of my fair experiences for the past three years, but no more! We're going, and we're going to see the pigs, and the biggest pumpkin, and some mutton busting, and the craft exhibits. When I was a kid, we entered competitions in our local fair, the Dixie Classic, almost every year. We entered the pumpkin painting contest a lot, and we'd enter for other handicrafts and artwork and photography. It was really neat to see a ribbon next to the entry with your name on it. We helped make a booth for our 4-H club often, too. Of course, Vance and I also loved the antique tractor exhibit. When he was a little boy, he had to climb all over them and get his picture taken. The fair isn't about rides to me. It's about country living, and I miss that. So this weekend, I get to get my fix. I'll probably take a million pictures, and I'll post some of them I'm sure. I hope all of you have a great weekend. I know I hope to.

Happy Birthday to Emma Catherine...

My good friend, Rachel, gave birth to a baby girl yesterday at 8:00 a.m. Welcome to the world, Emma Catherine! She was a little early at 38 weeks, but that didn't put a dent in her size, a hefty 9 lb., 11 oz. Rachel has the kind of labors and deliveries that most women dream about. This was her longest labor, at 1 1/2 hours, and she delivered her 9 pounder without tearing or anesthesia of any kind. Hear the jealousy. =) I'm so happy for the Brown family. When Rachel called to give me the news, all of a sudden I felt like having my son is actually getting close. I'm only at 22 weeks, so I've got about half of my pregnancy left to go, but it still felt more real. I kinda wanted to shout, "Ok, my turn next!" =) Rachel's happiness is more tangible to me now, I guess, and I want all the details for when my turn comes. We had a quiet weekend at home, and it was nice. Poor David is nursing a cold, and despite that, he put in a full day's work at our computer on Saturday. We got into a discussion of all the foods that our mothers' carefully rationed out to us as children, and this led to a discussion of the basic goodness of all things McDonalds. After we'd salivated over the thought of fries fried to perfection in animal lard, I decided to put my finished pot of soup in the fridge for another day, and we walked across the street to the mall food court. It was a nice little treat. Mom, if you're reading this, I swear I don't do it often. This baby is mostly on a strict diet of whole grains and low fat proteins. Mostly. =) We finally got another lamp for the dark corner of the dining room/living room, and it has made such a huge difference. It inspired me to think about putting more things up on the wall. I really do like our cozy, little apartment, and I'm also nesting. So I have to make it beautiful and homey for Baby, even if I can't paint. Oh, and as another random thought, I've been enjoying going to the blogs of other Christian women. One of my favorites is www.chasingcontentment.blogspot.com. Check it out sometime. It's worth a read. Have a great day! Until I write again...Ellen

The meet and greet...

This morning I thought I'd muse on meeting new people. It's something we've been doing a lot of lately. Our new church is the largest we've ever been in. I think there are about 500 adult members and about that many children. Seeing all those children is inspiring because its a sign that the church is growing and healthy. And I just love to watch little children running around with each other and teens raising their hands to praise during worship time. =) But since it's so large, that makes it strategically more difficult to meet others. David and I have become a tag team in this. We've developed a plan for Sunday mornings. We'll sit down, and we'll look around us and get our bearings. Then, during the 15 minute break time when the children go down for children's church, David will make initial contact with our seatmates. He'll introduce himself and get a conversation started, and then I'll jump in and provide backup to help him with whatever conversation he has going. =) We have different strengths and weaknesses that work well here. David is good at opening conversations and introducing himself, and this is my least favorite part of the meeting people thing. If it had just been up to me, the first few weeks that we were at church, I think I would've just gone, observed, and left without meeting anyone who didn't come up to me. Since we're in such a large church where it isn't so obvious who's new, that means that I wouldn't have talked to many people. Not because they're not friendly, but because they don't want to assume I'm new and then make a mistake. David, however, is great at opening conversations, and then he begins to feel more uneasy about coming up with conversation topics. So I swoop in with my small talk skills. =) I'm making this sound like a military maneuver because that's what it feels like sometimes when you're in a new place, and you have to make the effort and plan ahead to make contact with other humans. It requires initiative when you'd sometimes rather just hide out because you're tired of intiating. We all like our comfort zones, and it isn't comfortable to meet new people. We have to be friendly, and we have to smile when we're starving and cranky because we didn't plan for Baby's growth spurt during the service (that's me), and we have to desperately try to remember names and faces and pertinent information. But all the hard work eventually pays off. At least I keep reminding myself of this. After a couple of months of our strategic plan, David and I now know a lot of people to talk to after church. We can spend a good 1/2 hour to an hour talking to others now without necessarily meeting anyone new! We did it last week and were almost late to a picnic as a result, and I was amazed and thankful for that. Our initiative paid off, and hopefully God will provide deeper relationships from these initial contacts. We are also working on integrating ourselves into a small group, and we went to our second small group meeting last night. About half of the people there were people we hadn't met before, so there was a lot of meeting happening again. But we were also able to see a little progress in getting to know the others that we'd had contact with from last time and from church. Both were nice, but I'm mostly looking forward to getting beneath the surface and finding out more about the hearts and lives of the people that we're still in the process of meeting. They're fellow brothers and sisters with struggles and joys that I can learn from, and I'm ready to get down to doing more of that. But let's face it. You can't get to that until you go through the hard work of meet and greet. I get tired of that work, especially when I have few solid friendships to fall back on for comfort around here. You feel like a trapeze artist just swinging out there, leaping, and hoping that somebody will be kind enough to catch you. It's a little frightening because it's uncertain. You don't know who will subtly accept or reject your offer of friendship. You don't know who has room in their lives for one more relationship. After all, as cousin Keith says, "Making friends is like finding work with a company. You may be the best person for the job with the most wonderful credentials around, but if there isn't a job opening, they can't take you on." So here's to finding a job opening! I know there are a lot of us out there who are shy and are afraid of putting themselves out there to meet and possibly be rejected as friend candidates by others. But what is our alternative? Our alternative is loneliness. We all need each other, and we especially need others in the body of Christ for accountability and growth. We are not meant to be islands, and in our culture, it is far too easy for us to become islands. We don't have to have each other to meet basic, daily needs. We don't have to share farm labor in order to have something to eat; we can just go down to the corner store and buy something. In the process of using money to get our basic needs met, I think we lose a sense of community support. I don't know about you, but I look at the descriptions of early church life in the New Testament and long for something closer to that. I long for shared meals and willing giving of time and resources and joyful times of praise and thanksgiving. I can long for it all day, though, and it'll just be a dream unless I'm obedient to do something to put it into place. So if you've been hanging back, even though you sense that that woman you keep seeing on Sundays with the little boy who looks about your son's age could be a possible friend, stop doing it! Jump in there and introduce yourself. (I'm trying to take my own advice here.) We're all so good at putting up walls and acting self sufficient. Maybe she needs a friend as much as you do. You'll never know unless you swoop in for the meet and greet. =)

Musings on happiness...

Last night, I was sitting in our little living room with my darling, just sharing the day, and I started really thinking about all the recent changes we've experienced and how they felt to me. I guess I just started to take inventory of our life right now, and it all looks amazingly good. I started a new job on Tuesday, and it looks like our little class of older 2's is really going to go well. I can already sense the various personalities of the children, and I'm looking forward to getting to know and love all these children. I'm also going to be teaching a small, hands-on science enrichment class for 3-5 year olds, one hour a week for several weeks, and I'm enjoying looking for great experiments for us all to do together. David's work hasn't picked up so much yet that it's become difficult for us, and that has lasted far longer than I ever dreamed it would. He has lots of fascinating experiences and interesting conversations to tell me about when he comes home, and he involves me in the Supreme Court world. This is a once-in-a-lifetime, amazing opportunity that we're both just drinking in. He loves his job, and I love to see him loving it. We have a wonderful, healthy church filled with plenty of others our age and stage of life that we can serve and be served by. (Considering our last years of church and stage of life difficulty, that is a really neat sentence for me to write.) We're getting to know some of them better, and we have a chance to be involved in a great small group. I'm excited about the potential for neat friendships of all kinds around here. There are so many old friends that we've reconnected with, and so many new friends to become involved with that I'm overwhelmed. We give dinner invitations, and we receive them back. I don't feel the loneliness I did in infertility, surrounded by happy families. The friend part of life just isn't as difficult now as it has been the past few years. The crowning joy of the inventory is the miracle I feel all the time in my tummy. He's kicking me a good bit now, and I love to feel him telling me he's there and happy and growing up healthy. So I was sitting in the living room, thinking about all these things, and this profound feeling of happiness and gratitude to God came over me. We're settling in, and wow! Things actually look good! I think that I've been wary and watchful since we've moved, really for the past couple of years. What have I been watching for? The other shoe to drop. Disaster to fall from the clouds once again. Waves to capsize our ship once again while we desperately bail out the boat. I've been afraid to hope that it'll all be ok. Let's face it. I've been afraid to accept that God might have blessings for us that I like right now. I've been afraid to say that being happy is really ok. I know I've written about this before, and this is old territory for this blog. But it's something I struggle with emphasizing because I'm learning all the time lately the major impact that this way of viewing things has had on my life. For the past couple of years, I saw "happy" as a feeling that was pretty illusive. I would have various moments of happy, but I didn't expect them. I was hunting for joy. Joy, as we learn from Biblical studies of the concept, is something that God gives even when happiness is illusive. It doesn't rely on circumstances like happiness does, so it's something the Christian can get when happiness seems pretty far away. Joy wasn't working so much for me at the time either =), but I had it in my head that it was easier than happy, so I started saying things to myself like this: "Happiness in life shouldn't be my goal. It's not the point of the Christian life. Serving God in the circumstances that He's given me is my goal. Gotta kill the idea that happiness is what I'm seeking. Happiness- bad, self-sacrifice, serving, enduring-good. I'm pressing on, pilgrim (insert gritted teeth)." This kept me from feeling so guilty that I wasn't happier in the circumstances that God had assigned to me. I knew I should find more pleasure in the life that He wanted for me, but frankly, I wasn't doing well at that many days, so surviving and serving with bits of pleasure in there seemed like the best I could do. That takes us up to now. What do I do now when things really are going amazingly well? How should I feel? My default mode, built on this past baggage, has been to feel guilty for being happy since I wasn't so much when things weren't going my way. I've been cutting off the happy feeling at the knees, feeling that it wasn't appropriate for a person who wasn't particularly thrilled when things were bad to take pleasure in them once they were good. Yes, I should've been happier with God and life and all the blessings that I did have in darker days. I should've been more joyful in all things. But I wasn't, and I'm going to stop living in the guilt of that. I am clay, and He knows it. For most of us, it's a lot easier to be grateful to God when we're being blessed with flowers and candy than when we're being blessed with a heaping plateful of spiritual brussel sprouts. We don't talk about it; we know we're not supposed to see things this way, but guess what, our actions often show that we do. If we make any progress at all in appreciating our nasty vegetables, I'm going to call it a victory for weak humans. And since I made a little bit of progress and managed to swallow some of the little buggers, I'm going to stop feeling guilty, and I'm going to enjoy this time in my life, and all these particular blessings I've begged God for as long as they last. I'm really happy. There, I said it. I'm flooded with gratefulness at the mountains of blessings that I'm experiencing right now. I count them all, and there is so much that God has given us. I am grateful at the good things He's given, and the requests that He's graciously granted. My cup really overflows, and I don't know what to do with all the bounty. So I'm going to be happy. Ha! =)

It's a...

We had our big ultrasound last Wednesday at a local state-of-the-art radiology clinic. My doctor's office likes to send people there so they get the best quality ultrasound on the best equipment, and it was really nice! The picture was sooo clear. We could tell what everything was. The ultrasound tech took a long time going over the baby from head to toe. She measured lots of little bones, and she checked out kidney function and heart chambers. She even showed us blood flow. It was really neat. It left us with no doubt that this baby is extremely healthy and developmentally quite perfect right now. I was totally amazed that there is this delicate, perfect, little human weighing a little less than a pound doing cartwheels in my stomach. I've been able to feel Baby there for a couple of weeks now, and the movement has progressed from the feeling of a goldfish bumping against a bowl to bubbles popping in my tummy. But I still wasn't prepared for what I saw on the screen. I think that humans can easily unconsciously feel like they work to create most things, and they give themselves a lot of credit for the things they create. I think I may have worried about this baby being healthy because I often think I'm responsible for most things that I create, and it's hard to imagine me putting together a baby and doing it right. (Pregnancy magazines don't help this way of thinking because they make you worry over not eating the right things or eating the wrong things, putting all the empahsis on what you do or don't do.) I don't think I can even put together a bicycle if I have the instruction manual. =) Maybe I could see myself getting it right to create the little blob I saw on the screen at 8 weeks, but I knew a whole skeletal system was beyond me. So maybe I worried because I forgot that God does it all. If there was any doubt before that I was not responsible for creating this life, it was totally over when I saw what He'd put together in only a few short weeks. This child is a perfect, delicate, miniature human, and I marvel in a new way at the awesomeness of God as Creator of all Life. So, I digress, but back to the ultrasound tech and her thorough investigation of all things Baby. She went down the baby from head to toe, and when she got to the feet, she turned the view so it was looking straight up from the feet to Baby's little bottom. Then she asked, "So, what do you think it is?" David said I blurted out what he was thinking but was afraid to ask: "Is that a penis?" Yes, it most definitely was. We're having a little baby boy! I was so shocked that I asked the tech if she was sure that it wasn't the umbilical cord. She then proceeded to show us about 4 different angles of this particular body part, including one with the umbilical cord also in view. I'm relieved to say, in light of my last post, that I was not disappointed. I was mostly just shocked, since just about all of our friends and family thought it was a girl. David was really happy about the surprise, even though he was trying not to gloat. He had been hoping for a boy, though he'd have been happy to have a girl, too. I immediately started imagining him playing with his son, and it's a very sweet thought. They're going to have so much fun together destroying our home with their wrestling matches. I was, however, disappointed about losing my plans. I got attached to my girl plans, including buying all those cute dresses. Girl clothes are just cuter than boy clothes, in my opinion. After the ultrasound, we went to Target and got a little boy romper so I can start getting used to this new idea. Time for new plans and decorating options! Back to the drawing board on names! I'm so thankful for a healthy baby, and I'm looking forward to holding my little guy in my arms.