Oh how He loves us!

Wow... I didn't think when I wrote that last blog post, that hundreds of people would read it! My friend Heather works for VOM, & sent my blog along to the newsletter department because they had received so much negative feedback from that picture I wrote about. & somehow it ended up on their facebook page!

This was a huge blessing to me... last night, I met with the woman who is discipling me, & I was explaining that yes, I find much eternal purpose in being a wife & a mom, but sometimes I wonder how the Lord wants to use me outside of that. I believe that He does, but sometimes I don't see it. I mentioned that sometimes I feel like a failure, because I don't have this certain character trait or that natural ability. But the Lord revealed to me through this, that He can use me right where I am. A simple wife & mom, blogging about our boring lives & occasionally about what Jesus is teaching me - He can use something like that for His glory & for the encouragement of the saints. Amazing! I am so thankful for that word from Him. Continue in the way that the Spirit leads me, & He will use me, as the part of the Body that I am.

I love when He chooses to show us... "I do love you... you are valuable... & significant in My plan..."

Beauty

I receive a monthly newsletter from The Voice of the Martyrs (if you don't receive it, I recommend you contact them to do so - it's free - www.persecution.com). This month, the cover is a picture of a woman, Yubelina, from Indonesia. She was burned in an attack by Muslims on her Christian village.

Her skin is splotchy & ranges in color from light brown to red to white. Much of it is leathery. Her nose is disfigured. She has a purplish-colored patch of skin in between her bottom lip & the bottom of her chin. Her upper lip is peeling. Her left eye is white & red; her pupil is clearly no longer able to see.

But she is smiling. A huge smile. Joy radiates from her. Why?? She must receive stares. Children are probably afraid of her. The world would call her damaged. Ugly.

Yubelina has figured out where her identity lies. She is a treasured child of the King. She has traded "a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning" (Isa. 61:3). Her smile reveals Jesus.

Yubelina is beautiful. I guarantee she has a joy, a contentment, that no name-brand, trendy clothing; no perfect haircut & makeup; no flawless skin or toned body can bring.

I want to be beautiful like that. I want my face to shine like Moses, because I have been in the presence of God. I want my treasure to lie in heaven & not in the tangible, the material. I want to be joyful & content & full of peace.

Jesus, make it so.

"I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my soul shall exult in my God, for He has clothed me with the garments of salvation; He has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels." Isaiah 61:10

Rainy Saturday

It is really yucky out. It's been in the 30's & 40's almost all week, which is REALLY cold for San Antonio, & today it is drizzly too. Yuck.

Elliot has a cold :-( so he has been feeling snotty, sneezing & coughing & sleeping a lot. It is pretty sad.

These two things happened to coincide with our one free Saturday of the month. We had decided to work on the house today, specifically the study, cleaning it out & organizing. We have two old computers that we are in the process of clearing so we can donate them, & I have sorted through all my work stuff, thrown away lots of old unnecessary papers... ah, it feels good to throw things away! Josh & I have also had some work to do today for our jobs, so all in all, it's been a fairly productive, inside kind of day.

We went to the doctor yesterday for Elliot's cough, as a perfectly normal nervous first-time mother would, & found out his weight is 13 pounds, 7 ounces. I measured him today at 25.25 inches. That makes him at the 78th percentile for height, & the 41st percentile for weight. Our little guy is looking long & lean! He's 3 months on Tuesday... crazy.

That's all for now, just thought I'd check in... back to being productive!

Time for Normal

Today is a big fat *sigh* to me. In a good way. Finally, Christmas gift buying is over, traveling is over (for a couple weeks, anyways!), busyness is over... phewwwww. This week, I have time to clean my house, how about that??

I am feeling thankful for newness today, as well. Yes, it's a new year, but that is just a coincidence for me - for me, it's getting back to normal like I mentioned, but also I feel like I'm getting a new start with things - back to eating well, back to exercise (at least, I have high hopes for this one starting soon, I just need to find the time), & back to spending time with the Lord in the morning with my cup of coffee. It's these things that are just good to me! & a good mixture of busyness & laziness have kept those things from being the norm lately. Since Elliot was born, I have felt like I've been in a bit of a funk, unable to get to normal routine & do anything more than the things that were pressing. All I did was take care of Elliot (because his life kind of depends on me), do laundry (because we need clothes), grocery shop (because we need food), & work (because I had a deadline). But in a less pressing way, I NEED to spend time with God every day, in the Word & in prayer; I NEED to exercise; I NEED to be purposeful about eating well. These are not New Year's resolutions to me - this is getting back to normal. This is starting fresh, full of grace. Oh yeah, & the desire to fit into my jeans again, sooner than later. :-)

We rang in the New Year in North Carolina at Zac & Cara's wedding. It was really fun to spend time with them, & their reception was a blast. Elliot did really well the first 3 days, then all that lack of napping & too much car-seating caught up with him, & he didn't do so well the day we came home. But today he's back to normal, sleeping lots. Anyways, Zac & Cara have moved overseas, so no vacations with them for at least a year & a half, but they will resume one day, & until then, plenty of Skype dates.

This month is filling up with fun, less stressful plans, like a Cotton Bowl party Friday, going to College Station, & my birthday :-) . It'll be a good month.

11 Rules School Won't Teach You About Marriage

I received this in an email from FamilyLife, & thought I'd share... good stuff!

Rule 1: Marriage isn’t about your happiness. It’s not about you getting all your needs met through another person. Practicing self-denial and self-sacrifice, patience, understanding, and forgiveness are the fundamentals of a great marriage. If you want to be the center of the universe, then there’s a much better chance of that happening if you stay single.

Rule 2: Getting married gives a man a chance to step up and finish growing up. The best preparation for marriage for a single man is to man up now and keep on becoming the man God created him to be.

Rule 3: It’s okay to have one rookie season, but it’s not okay to repeat your rookie season. You will make rookie mistakes in your first year of marriage; the key is that you don’t continue making those same mistakes in year five, year 10, or year 20 of your marriage.

Rule 4: It takes a real man to be satisfied with and love one woman for a lifetime. And it takes a real woman to be content with and respect one man for a lifetime.

Rule 5: Love isn’t a feeling. Love is commitment. It’s time to replace the “D word”—divorce—with the “C word”—commitment. Divorce may feel like a happy solution, but it results in long-term toxic baggage. You can’t begin a marriage without commitment. You can’t sustain one without it either. A marriage that goes the distance is really hard work. If you want something that is easy and has immediate gratification, then go shopping or play a video game.

Rule 6: Online relationships with old high school or college flames, emotional affairs, sexual affairs, and cohabiting are shallow and illegitimate substitutes for the real thing. Emotional and sexual fidelity in marriage is the real thing.

Rule 7: Women spell romance R-E-L-A-T-I-O-N-S-H-I-P. Men spell romance S-E-X. If you want to speak romance to your spouse, become a student of your spouse and enroll in a lifelong “Romantic Language School,” and become fluent in your spouse’s language.

Rule 8: During courtship, opposites attract. After marriage, opposites can repel each another. You married your spouse because he/she is different. Differences are God’s gift to you to create new capacities in your life. Different isn’t wrong, it’s just different.

Rule 9: Pornography robs men of a real relationship with a real person and poisons real masculinity, replacing it with the toxic killers of shame, deceit, and isolation. Pornography siphons off a man’s drive for intimacy with his wife. Marriage is not for wimps. Accept no substitutes.

Rule 10: As a home is built, it will reflect the builder. Most couples fail to consult the Master Architect and His blueprints for building a home. Instead a man and woman marry with two sets of blueprints (his and hers). As they begin building, they discover that a home can’t be built from two very different sets of blueprints.

Rule 11: How you will be remembered has less to do with how much money you make or how much you accomplish and more with how you have loved and lived.

Quick update!

Oh my, I have been horrible at updating this thing. If you still read this, way to go you, & my apologies for being a blogging loser!

Elliot is 8 weeks old as of yesterday. He has gotten so big already (almost 13 lbs & 23.5 inches). He smiles lots at me & Josh & occasionally at other people. He sleeps from about 10pm - 7/8am, & usually wakes up every 4 hrs, but a couple times has gone 6ish hours, which was awesome! He is content & happy most of the time, unless he's tired, & he's not a huge fan of being in his carseat unless he's sleeping so he can get fussy then too.

I am loving cloth diapering! He's getting to the size that the one-size pocket diapers I have are starting to fit, which is fun because I have so many cute ones! I think I'm going to prefer them over the other types, though only time will tell. Up until this point, we have been using prefolds & covers, which is more the old-school type of diaper, but I must say, they hold in those pees & poops - I have only had one poo leak!

I have been busy lately - besides the normal feeding/changing/holding Elliot, we have had a lot of appointments (thrush/mastitis - yuck :-( ) & have been doing Christmasy things, which explains the lack of blogging! My house has taken a definite hit to my busyness, & I'm working on it. We are falling into a more predictable schedule & I know life will slow down soon. Plus, it's so hard to be "productive" when I would much rather just hold my baby! So we are working out that balance. I am also inching back into work; I have been so blessed to have been able to take this much time off. I am thankful to work for an amazing group of people who value the role of a mother! & so thankful to be able to work part-time from home so I can still be with Elliot.

Okay, time to go check things off that pesky to-do list!

Elliot's Birth Story

Elliot is napping, so I suppose I should blog!

I should warn you, if you don't care to know things about labor & delivery, don't read below. I won't go into too much detail, but either way, read at your own risk! Oh & considering how long it is, I'll be impressed if anyone reads it at all. :-)

So Saturday the 16th, we went to the pumpkin patch in Medina (like I had told you we would) to try to walk Elliot out. It didn't work, but we had fun. That night we went to bed around 10 (which is late for us!) & I woke up just after midnight & felt like I had to go to the bathroom (which wasn't unusual), but as I got up I felt like something was different... then my water broke. (I had NO DOUBT my water broke, either!) After yelling at Josh & "dealing" with the situation, if you will, I called the on-call midwife to tell her. Due to certain factors, she advised us to go ahead & head to the hospital instead of waiting until morning. So we got showered & packed up & headed out. We got to the hospital around 2 am.

I should go ahead & say, we had taken Bradley classes & were desiring to have a birth with no intervention. I planned to have no IVs (I hate needles), no meds, just a natural birth. We had great midwives that completely supported this, & were at a hospital that has more natural births than most in San Antonio. So now that you know that, we continue.

I hadn't been contracting this whole time. Once we got to the hospital & they drew blood (ugh), got us all registered, & got me on the monitor, we saw I was having small contractions every 5-7 minutes. But since they weren't strong, we decided to sleep while we could. Josh fell asleep fairly quickly & got maybe 3 hours of sleep, & I eventually fell asleep & got maybe 1.5 hours. When we woke up, I wasn't contracting noticeably at all, so Josh ran out to get us breakfast. That morning we walked, bounced on the birth ball, rocked in a chair, etc. to try to get contractions going. Nothing worked. Around noon, our midwife told us we had two options: we could continue to wait & hope that contractions started, but we needed to have labor started in another 12 hours (due to risk of infection), or we could induce sooner. She has seen many natural births & felt that I probably wasn't going to start contracting on my own any time soon. Josh & I talked... this was really frustrating, to think of inducing when we wanted no interventions & had been told that induction most often leads to an epidural as well because of the intensity & quick progression of labor. But we felt inducing soon would be better than waiting until we had been up for basically a day before starting labor, so after 2 pm (& after eating lunch & walking some more), we started Pitocin.

When we started Pitocin, I was checked & was at 1.5 cm dilated, & 70% effaced. I was really discouraged that I had barely dilated at this point. Contractions started to hurt about an hour later. By 7 pm, I was hurting really badly. Our midwife came in & stayed for the rest of my labor, helping me through contractions & rubbing my lower back. I wanted to be checked again to see how I was progressing; because it hurt so bad, I wanted to know where I was in the whole process. I was at 3 cm. THREE! In almost 5 hours, I had only dilated 1.5 more centimeters. Somehow I made it another hour, & the pain was worse, so I demanded to get checked again, saying if I wasn't progressing much still, I wanted pain meds. I couldn't imagine the pain getting worse, or dealing with it for several more hours. I remember saying, "I just don't care anymore!" But at the same time, I knew that the things I was saying had to mean I was in transition (as we had learned in our classes). I was at 6 cm at this point - I had dilated 3 cm in one hour. Josh was so encouraging & was an awesome labor coach. He knew the goal we had set & tried to remind me why we were doing this.

(By this time, I was definitely out of it. Sometimes I knew what I was saying & sometimes I didn't. I honestly wondered at times if this was actually happening - was this a dream? Was I saying those words, or was that someone else? I think that I had to separate myself from what was happening in order to handle it.)

The next 2 hours were a blur to me (for the reasons I just mentioned). I was exhausted at this point & was actually falling asleep in the 60 seconds between contractions. Around 10 pm, it was time to push. So it had taken me almost 5 hours to dilate from 1.5 to 3 cm, then 3 hours to dilate from 3 to 10 cm.

I'll spare you the details of pushing, but I pushed for 2.5 hours - this was the hardest workout of my life!! Basically, Elliot's head didn't really mold into that lovely cone head that so many babies have, so his perfectly round 35 cm head didn't exactly fly out (in fact, I heard a nurse in the room saying, "Man, he just doesn't want to come out!" Awesome.) Oh, speaking of, there is a problem with that math - 35 cm head, & full dilation is 10 cm - not cool! Anyways, for this reason recovery has been a little hard on me, as you can imagine!

I was so out of it when he was born - they put him on me & I remember thinking, "...he's purple." It took some time for me to come back mentally, plus my eyes had been shut for a few hours, I was told (that whole separating myself thing, I guess). It was 24 hours from water breaking to delivery - Elliot was born at 12:32 am on Monday morning the 18th (his due date!), at a whopping 9 lbs 5 oz, 20.25 inches long. I was so tired. We got moved up to our post-partum room & slept for maybe a couple hours before morning.

When the nurse took me to the bathroom for the first time after delivery, I kind of passed out in the bathroom & Josh thought I was dying. Oops. My heart rate was so high it wasn't showing up on the machine, then it dropped to 164(!), so I got poked with MORE needles for an IV to be pumped with fluids, had to be put on oxygen, etc. Oh boy. I severely needed rest & food! We didn't really sleep until that night though... a good 44ish hours after water breaking.

SO, labor & delivery was not really what we had expected. Things happened that we didn't have control over. But we had an awesome midwife, great nurses, were in a wonderful hospital, & I had the best labor coach, best friend, best supporter ever. So though it's not something I care to do again (Pitocin-driven contractions & hours of pushing), we are pleased with the way things turned out, & we have the cutest little guy ever as a result. He was worth it!

I have a couple other blogs I want to write, so hopefully those will come soon. :-)