The stork is coming! The stork is coming!

The stork is coming and dropping off a bundle at my house! The due date for the baby to arrive will be on March 17th, via C-section! Isn't that exciting?

The "L" Fairy

I'm trapped, a prisoner in my own home. And I have chosen this fate for myself because I have a secret identity....I am the laundry fairy. (insert dramatic music here)

Have you ever gone into your dresser drawers and found your favorite shirt is clean and smelling April Fresh? Have you opened your closet door and seen that your softest fleece shirt is neatly hung up instead of laying in a heap next to the bed? Have you ever wondered where the endless supply of clean socks and underwear seem to come from in your house? Chances are, you have a laundry fairy at home, too.

The "L" in our household is never ending. It is the bane of my existence. If I get the kids' clothes all done and put away, the husband seems to have mysteriously run out of clean shirts. Or uniforms. So I get the husband's clothes done, only to discover that I am completely out of clean maternity pants to wear (which isn't' really that hard to do, seeing that I only have 3 pants that fit at all!) So, it's back to the washing machine I go. Wash, dry, fold...or not fold, rather....because if I folded everything that came out of dryer, I would have NO LIFE! Rather, throw it all in the hallway and hope to God that another L Fairy will visit. But none other has stopped by our house since I became the CEO of this establishment. It's a daunting task, and the only thanks you get is the occasional pocket full of rocks or seashells(from the kids) or some loose change and ballpoint pens (Which I have been saving up for sometime now, to buy the laundry fairy a cruise and a notebook to use her saved up pens on writing her adventures !)

Oh dear. There is that dreaded buzzer again. The one that says that duty calls....time for me to dawn my wings and fold those clothes. Surely....when I get to Heaven...clothes will either never get dirty, smelly, sweaty, or stinky. I will pass into the pearly gates and God will tell me "Well done, thou good and faithful Laundry Fairy!" and reward me with my own Laundress. Right now, I'm in the depths of laundry hell.

Always Look on the Bright Side of Life

In the spirit of my "attitudes" post from a little while back, I am having my first test. I received an email from my husband at work yesterday with a copy of our new orders on it. We are moving, and we finally know where. We are moving to the land of crawdads and Mardi Gras. We are going to Louisiana! This move was expected, but the location is FAR from anywhere that our family wanted to move to. But upon opening the email and seeing the orders, and with my immediate disappointment came the realization.....there is nothing that I can change now about our situation except my attitude.

SOOOOOOO.....we do not have to travel halfway around the world with a new infant, Hooray! I am still within driving distance of family members! Hooray! We are not sending my husband to Alaska on an unaccompanied tour. Hooray! The location where we will be moving to will be warm and we won't be freezing our posteriors off 9 months out of the year. Hooray! Our unit will be smaller, and and that means a lot in terms of friendships. Hooray! This move will not really be that bad at all now, will it? Sure, we will be uprooting (again), but I guess that's the nature of the military life. It's a fresh start in a new home with new friends and family and church and local every couple of years. I chose this life, in a way.

How does that Monte Python song go? Always Look on the Bright Side of Life See? I can do this!

My life as a Blond.

I'm blond. There is no denying it. And there is nothing that I can do about it. I was born blond. I was raised blond. I have lived the blond life. I have heard every blond joke that there is to be told. I have tried very hard to stay away from being the stereotypical blond and have for the most part succeeded. And then.... I married another blond. And now I have blond children. Walking into our house is kind of like watching Village of the Damned. We are blond.
There is only one time in my life where I wasn't blond, and that was for about 2 weeks during my freshman year of college. I decided that I was going to part ways with my blondness, and go darker. I was going for a lovely shade of red/brown. For as long as I could remember, I had wanted brown hair. Everyone had it, except for me. So I decided that I was going to test my newfound independence by dying my hair. My roommate and I hit the store where I purchased one of those lovely home hair coloring kits.
We brought it back to the dorm and read the directions carefully. I wanted to make perfectly sure that NONE of my blond hair was left when we were done. My roommate set to work on my head. As she was applying the dye...she remarked how REALLY dark it was coming out of the bottle. And she also remarked how she was making sure to put extra dye on the tips of my hair so that it wouldn't look funny. She told me that she had dyed her hair millions of time. Of course, she had lovely dark curly hair!
When she had finished the job...it was time for me to dry my hair. I took my time, and dried it thoroughly, but I didn't check my hair in the mirror as I wanted the finished product to be a surprise. I had hardly ever cut my hair in my whole life, so there was indeed a great deal of hair to be dried. Finally, when I had finished, I took a brave peek in the mirror.
Oh, Lord.
My roommate came in the bathroom to look at it. Her reaction was the same as mine.
Oh Lord.
She yelled across the hall to one of our friends to come and see my hair. She came running. And her reaction was quite similar.
Oh Lord.
"Jenny!" she screamed. "What have you done! Your hair is....is....is....oh my gosh! It's the color of a dollar bill!"
That's right. My lovely golden locks of hair, had been transformed into a hideous shade of green instead of the luscious red/brown that had been promised on the box. And when I mean hideous, I mean think back to the grossest shade of green that you can think of, and then magnify it 20 times over, and then puke on it. That's the color that my hair was. Frankenstein green.
I picked up the box that the dye came in, and read the back again. We had followed the directions to a T! I couldn't figure out what went wrong. And what's worse...the cute girl on the box happened to be laughing at me! Ugh! I tried in vain to call the costumer service line that was on the back of the box...only to realize that it was a Friday night....and no one would be there to answer my questions until Monday morning. We called another friend who was a beautician who said that no one should ever dye their hair from a box...but made a couple of suggestions to help me out.
She suggested washing my hair in Tide. Yep. Laundry detergent. Extra strength. So I did. Four or 5 times I tried to wash my hair with that toxic stuff, until my poor hair was so dry and brittle that some of it started to fall out. I wasn't about to cut my hair off, like brave Anne did in her book Anne of Green Gables! There was nothing left to do but put on a hat and wait for payday to arrive so that I could have my hair professionally dyed back to it's original color. Payday was 2 weeks away...about the equivalent to eternity to a very poor college student who had just spent her last 10 bucks on a box of hair dye.
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You would think that I had learned my lesson about the color of hair that God gave me....not to mess with it. It was several years later, where I made an even worse mistake. Only, I wasn't the one that had to live with the funky hair color. It was my children.....a mistake that to this day I look back on with sheer mortification.
One Halloween, we had been invited to a costume party at a friend's house. My children were dressed as little flower fairies. I thought that it would be cute to buy some of that colored hair spray and spray some on their hair. I chose pink, of course! They looked so cute at that party running around in their little fairy dresses with their bright pink hair. Just adorable.
Later that evening I got them home and into the bathtub to wash out the pink stuff. BAD NEWS. REALLY REALLY REALLY BAD. I washed it several time...but unknown to me, baby hair is more porous than adult hair, and I had sprayed tons of it on my little imps. The pink was there to stay, and there was NOTHING that could be done about it. As a matter of fact, their poor hair was quite the sight for a couple of months after that....in their portraits for Christmas that year, there was still traces of pink in their hair. The relatives still talk about it to this day. I have learned my lesson.
So I have learned to make peace with my blondness. And my husband's blondness. And my children's blondness. We are blond, it's the color God gave us, and it shouldn't be messed with.

Pregnancy and Craziness

Things I love about being pregnant:

• food cravings (this time around I can't seem to eat enough soup, or grapefruit!)
  
• feeling the baby moving
• folding little itty bitty baby clothes (over and over and over again!)
  
• nesting
• the general idea that the family is expanding
  
• getting to skip ahead in line when waiting to use a public rest room
• long beautiful fingernails, and really thick hair (Oh man, I love prenatal vitamins!)
• pregnancy libido (no comment necessary here! )
• people telling my how great I look (even if they are lying!)
• shopping for baby stuff. This time, used items are the way to go! Online yardsales are the best!
• picking out names
• ultrasounds
  
• heartbeats
• watching the lumps that move around, and trying to figure out which lump is a hand, a foot, a knee, an elbow or a little tushy
  
• Knowing that God is the only one responsible for the human life that is growing inside of me. He chose me...of all people, to care for one of His most precious creations.
  

Things that I miss horribly while being pregnant:

• sleeping comfortably (notice I didn't say 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep...because I know what's coming soon!)
  
• my belly button
• Endless cups of coffee (I used to drink about 8 cups of coffee, somehow I have managed to cut back to about one or two cups a day!)
  
• An occasional glass of wine
• comfortable activities with my husband
• normal clothes
• hot hot baths (you know the kind...where you try to melt your skin off. This aren't allowed for fear that you will cook your baby :( )
• playing comfortably on the floor with my other children
• my lap...my poor little girls have no place to sit when I read to them!
• breathing deeply
• sleeping on my stomach
  

Things that I WILL NOT miss about being pregnant:

• stretch marks (I wonder if I should post a picture of what my stomach looks like!)
  
• maternity clothes (especially this time....they did away with full paneled pants, and now it's just a half panel! I can't keep any of my pants from falling down! And the shirts!!!! They are too short to cover anything the size of a grapefruit, much less the size of a woman carrying something the size of a watermelon!)
• oh-so-sexy support stockings!
  
• heartburn
  
• these stinking leg cramps I've been getting at night
• people telling me that I'm huge! For crying out loud...never tell a preggo woman that she is huge or compare her to other people that are pregnant. She already knows she looks huge.
  
• depleted energy (what do you mean I have to make the bed! I'd rather just stay in it all day long and read a book)
• going to the bathroom 50 bazillion times a day.
  
• contractions, contractions, contractions! Whoever invented Braxton Hicks contractions (and said that they don't hurt!) was obviously a man....these contractions really do hurt!
  
• Fatal attempts at doing housework, especially when it requires bending and lifting!
• People asking if I'm expecting twins
• People asking if I know what I'm having yet (I'm having a baby! A baby human! It's not a puppy or an elephant, I swear!)
  

Attitudes....

I've been pondering for the last few days about attitudes. Good ones, bad ones. My own "stinkin thinkin," as I like to call it.

I have a pastor that seems always have a great attitude about everything. I'm not kidding! Recently, his 16 year old son was diagnosed with leukemia. We've all been watching from a distance how their family would react to such a crisis. We have been rallying around them with love and support...with the thought that somehow our normally cheerful and optimistic pastor would fall into the trap of the pity party and bad attitude. But he didn't. He didn't curse God, he didn't abandon his family, nor did he leave his church in the dark about anything.

I have watched in awe as their family melded together and became even stronger. The cancer barely seemed to rock their boat at all on the outside...they simply took the situation for what it was, and ran with it! How do they do that? And make it look so effortless? I heard that when their son is sleeping in the hospital, the pastor goes out and ministers to other patients, instead of wallowing in self pity and a "whoa is me" attitude. And all along, people have been asking him "Why you?" and he responds to them "Why not, me?" as if suffering through this trying time is the most natural thing in the world. And I want that attitude. The one that says how can I continue to be a light, a shining example to others when the going gets tough? Well, thank you God for putting people in my life that can be that example for me.

In my own world, I have a huge mess going on. Besides being pregnant and due in the next 6 weeks, I have to sell our house and prepare for our move. I have a daughter with some developmental delays that she is finally getting help for...only to be stalled in the process of having to locate new therapists and have to start from scratch with the insurance company. I have classes to teach, children to raise, a homeschool to operate. Once again, we are going to be uprooted from all that we hold dear-our friends, our home, our church family. And I have totally taken the wrong attitude in the whole thing. I dove head on into my own self-made "pity party" instead of taking the high road that the Lord is trying to call me to. What's worse, I have invited all those around me to join me in my pity party. YUCK! Talk about "stinkin' thinkin!!!"

God has called me to be His own...to lean on Him when the trying times get tough. I don't know why I seem to keep forgetting that. I have been asking the "Why me, God?" question too often, and totally discounting God in His awesomeness who wants me to lean on Him to rise above the situation and ask "Well, why not me?" He has called me into these particular circumstances for a reason, and wants to see me succeed. Truly, He does.

God saw this particular bumpy spot on my journey of life a long time ago. And as much as I hate to say it, He has been preparing me for this moment for a long long time. Just as he was preparing my pastor's family for their rocky part of the journey. So for now, I am going to take off my pity party hat. It was too big anyways...and totally worthless. I'm taking up my optimistic party horn, giving it a toot and yelling Philippians 4:13 at the top of my lungs out my open windows. I suppose, I shall believe it for myself when I start living it, eh?