Wreath, Labor, & Blessings…I think

If you didn’t read the last post on this blog, you need to. My husband is so fantastic and so is his surprise guest post for my birthday. Seriously…read it here now. You’ll fall in love with him (in a strictly platonic way – otherwise I’ll kill you…in sisterly love).

Beautiful, Paperful Wreath

What have I been doing with my time? Still going strong with the nesting thing. I’m pretty sure the employees at Michael’s are beginning to recognize me.

Last week I made a paper rosette wreath (seen first on Pinterest, my new love). It turned out really cute, but it literally took me 2 days to fold up all the paper roses.

I feel like a relatively intelligent person until you put a hot glue gun in my hand. It is physically impossible for me to hot glue something without having at least 7 glue “spiderwebs” all over me and 2-3 burns on my fingers, where I couldn’t resist touching the hot glue to see if it was dry.

The tutorial I found here was super helpful.  I ended up using 2 old crime/thriller novels to make the roses – about 500 book pages total. (Sorry David Baldacci and whoever the other author was. I’m sure they were riveting, suspenseful tales.) I used the crime fiction genre in the event that someone anyone gets stuck in our hall for a long time, they can piece together the crime scenes. 

 

…is happening very soon. So, a few thoughts on having this babe. It’s 9 days until the due date, but I’m wishing him out tomorrow. The following are not related or even logical thoughts…just ramblings from a hormonal, crazy person.

I can tell you how long each cashier within a 2 mile radius of my house was in labor with each of her children. I don’t want to be able to tell you that, but I sure enough can. I guess it’s some rite of passage – you give birth, you tell everyone every detail of your experience. I bet you’re all excited now for my first post after he gets here.

Girls: you know that feeling when you are riding your brother’s bike with the added metal bar and fall off onto the bar, injuring your bones? (No? Just me?) Either way, this is what doctors dub the “third trimester”. I can’t prove this without medical machinery, but I’m 99.9% sure there is a 14-pound bowling ball sitting on top of my pelvic bone. Well…a bowling ball with limbs. And hiccups. Either way – highly uncomfortable.

Is it weird to you that you fill out endless amounts of paperwork to get a gym membership (and work even harder to attempt canceling said membership) but you don’t have any sort of mental or physical tests before you’re allowed to have a baby? Hospitals just hand over brand new babies. To anyone. “Are you breathing? Do you have a car seat? Great. Here’s your baby. Best of luck.”

I was unaware of the exact procedures of checking progression before labor. What they do to you in that tiny, cramped room is illegal on several levels. Wow.

1. Shaving cankles. How many times have you cut your ankle bone shaving? There’s a solution – cankles. It makes the surface much smoother with less risk of injury.
2. Built-in shelf. I set my cereal bowl, coffee, ice cream, candy bars, tv remotes, and more on my own little shelf. 
3. Being the first to the bathroom. People see a pregnant person and gauge their need to use the restroom at URGENT. Even if it’s not very urgent, I kindly accept their kindness to let me skip the entire line to go first.
4. Stranger compliments. I actually have a love/hate relationship with this concept because sometimes the compliments are packaged in an insult such as, “Aw, you don’t look that big!” Other times they’re just nice because they know it’s miserable at this stage.

As for when I’m not pregnant, I will do these 3 things first: wear my wedding ring, drink some delicious Chianti, and lay on my stomach. Perhaps simultaneously.

Finally, a quote from the pediatrician who taught Taylor’s “Dad’s Only” class last week:

So a few weeks ago we had to pay to get our car fixed from an accident that was very obviously not my fault to everyone but the other guy’s insurance. This is very frustrating when you don’t really have money to spend on fixing damage that wasn’t exactly your fault. We were really stressed about the whole situation, but when we went to get our car at the service center, the employee informed us that she didn’t know what the deal was or why this was happening, but somehow we didn’t have to pay anything. She kept saying how rare this was and how most of the time you pay and hope to get your money back later.
The whole way back to our house, we were grinning like idiots at what a blessing it was that this had happened. I kept saying, “Of course it’s like God to go this route. We stress and stress but in the end he takes care of us.” We were excited and very grateful to catch a break.

A few days later, we get a call saying, “Yea…not really sure what happened…must have been a glitch in the system, but we need that money we thought you didn’t owe us.”

Humph.

Well, that sucks.

I can’t help writing what’s in my head these days without constantly coming back to the fact that God is up to something in our lives. There have been so many strange, stressful, crazy things over the past year, it’s irrefutable we’re in a season of growth amidst quite a bit of uncertainty.

It’s living in the “unknown” when your faith and trust is tested. I think we’ve grown (and continue to grow) through our experiences, but it is not easy.  It’s especially not easy when you attribute something as a blessing (i.e. the whole “not owing money for unexplained reasons”) that doesn’t exactly turn out like you thought it would. Kinda hard to swallow. Kinda makes you look stupid when you have already told people the story of how God was faithful and how you caught a break you really needed.

Still, looking at how our life has played out recently, I can always see God working through different situations and circumstances. It then begins to frustrate me to think how easy it is to forget he’s on our side the second something goes awry. I mean, seriously. We have a whole book about a faithful God then seem to develop dementia within seconds of hearing bad news…or being laid off…or paying for a car wreck that wasn’t your fault…or you name it. 

Now, I’ve been intentionally on the lookout for blessings during our “crazy” period. Sure enough – they’re all around us: a healthy baby boy, baby showers from people who love us, having air conditioning in 106 degree weather…you name it.

Will you do me a solid and remind me occasionally that God is faithful? Apparently, like Dory, I suffer from short term memory loss.

That’s all. I ran out of thoughts. As usual, they’re very sporadic and don’t necessarily flow. All I know is this: we’re all going to be ok. The world, our lives, our country…none of it is the worst it’s ever been. There’s been worse…and will be worse still. No matter what the stock market is doing, or how many heat records we try to break this summer, or how long the Double Down sandwich from KFC is actually offered as an option for food, or how many wrecks we get in…I promise we’ll be ok. Ok?

Now…let’s have a baby!