Rainbow Wagon

I found this little wagon at a thrift store last summer- before I was pregnant. I loved that it was vintage and colorful, so when I spotted the $2.50 price tag, I grabbed it up. I have to admit that I did look on Ebay to see what it might sell for. There was only one listed and while it was selling for more than I paid, it wasn’t enough to convince me to sell it. It reminds me of something my grandmother would have had in her home for her grandkids to play with.

 

 

Now that I’m pregnant, I’m thinking this will make a nice little addition to the baby’s area (little WMD will be sharing a room with our office). I don’t know if I will let the baby play with it though. I wonder if it contains lead paint since it was manufactured in the early 1960s. Any ideas? I do love the fact that it’s all wood and it would be great for motor skills, so it would be nice to know whether or not it’s safe for a toddler to slobber all over.

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Ikea Redux

This:

Plus This:

Equals This:

My mom, my aunt and I made our annual pilgrimage to Ikea while the WMD and I were in Michigan for the holidays (Note: The WMD did NOT go to Ikea with us. That’s not the WMD’s thing. He would want me to note this for my readers). Since it’s only a once a year kind of thing,  we took our time meandering around each floor and enjoying lunch in the cafe.

Now, there’s never a shortage of things that I want each time we make this trip. In fact, there’s usually a surplus. However, taking into consideration that any items purchased have to be transported across country and then find a place in a teeny, tiny house means that I often leave with very little. In fact, it wasn’t until we got to the very end of our shopping trip that I spotted this little number. I liked the shape of it and I liked the $6 price tag even better, so I snapped it up in a heartbeat.  Once we were back in good ole’ North Cackilacky, I went to the HD (Home Depot), picked up my color de rigeur and spray painted that baby a nice shade of apple red to match the other side tables in the living room.

Now I just need a plant. Should have picked one of those up at Ikea too.

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Lovely Gift

Dawn of Lovely Paper created this beautiful piece of art for me out of papers I sent to her last summer. The deal was that I would send her some of my art paper and she would use some of it to create something for me. Can I just say how much I LOVE this?! At the time of the trade, I wasn’t pregnant, but I’m so glad that she waited to create something for me until I was. I now have a wonderful piece of art to commemorate this special time in my life and I’m so grateful for that!

Thank you Dawn. You are so very talented and this means more to me than you realize.

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Snow Day! Snow Day!

The bread and milk are nowhere to be found in the stores, work is cancelled and the roads are impassable, which means- SNOW DAY!

We have three inches and it’s still coming down strong. Okay, I know this really isn’t a big deal for my family and friends in Michigan, but here in North Carolina, this type of thing doesn’t happen very often. It’s been two years since our last snow day and that was for only an inch of snow, so this, this is exciting.

Even the WMD’s little gnome friend is enjoying the scene, snow beard and all. I’ve got a pot roast dinner in the crock pot and a day to dilly-dally around the house with the WMD. We even plan to watch the inauguration. Heck, with the work holiday yesterday and if the snow keeps on falling, I may get a five day weekend and a two day work week- as life should be. I think I’ll go have some more hot chocolate.

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Fear not

One of the things that I didn’t anticipate when I imagined having a baby was the amount of fear that would accompany the process of becoming a mother. I’ve always been one prone to worry- which is really just another name for fear. While I realize that worrying really never accomplishes anything and doesn’t solve any problems, I’ve always persisted in my anxiety over the unknowns and the “what-ifs?”

So, I don’t know why I was surprised, but I was in fact surprised by the immediate fear I felt when I found out I was pregnant. I always imagined that I would feel immense joy, and there was some of that, but really, my biggest reaction was one of fear. Doubtful questions immediately filled my mind: Were we ready for parenthood? How could we provide for a child? What if there was something wrong with the baby? What if I lost the baby? In what really should have been a moment of elation, I was mired down by the weight of fear.

Looking back on my reaction to change in my life, I can’t say I’m surprised. I always fear what’s to come, even if I have a strong sense that what I’m about to embark on is a good thing. Instead of facing it with curiosity and excitement, I lay awake at night and try to make an accounting of what I feel are our securities. It’s a control thing.

As I look back, at each of the major forks in the road in our 4+ years of marriage (and really, beyond that to our single days), I am amazed at how it’s always been for the better in the end. No matter how much I worried about what was to come or how we were going to make it, I had no idea it would be this good on the other side. I just had to get here and trust that it would be.

And looking back on it, it seems that this verse comes up over and over again, either through the gentle reminder of a friend, the preaching of a sermon or just by my stumbling on it, it’s always comes up when I am about at my breaking point with worry:

       Do not fear, for I am with you;
       do not be dismayed, for I am your God.
       I will strengthen you and help you;
       I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
       -Isaiah 41:10

Funny, huh, how I’m always reminded of this when the going is particularly tough? I actually heard it twice in the last day from two different sources. When I heard it again today, I had to try really hard not to cry (I was in public after all. And I’m hormonal.). Hearing it again reminded me of the last time I heard it and of what I was feeling then, which was very similar to what I’ve been feeling these last twelve weeks. And it reminded me of the faithfulness of God at that time and reassured me of the faithfulness of God now and in the future. It doesn’t mean that the road ahead will be easy. It wasn’t back then, either.

But it was good.

And this road will be too. Far more than I can imagine.

(I was going to write about this great recipe, but the photos I took didn’t turn out and really, I just felt the need to write this tonight. But, I do recommend trying the recipe. I ate it for three meals in a row- and only hurled once!)

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Las Margaritas

So I’ve been craving Mexican food all week, but the WMD has had a nasty flu bug that knocked him out and I had to wait until he was better to get him to take me out to eat. While I wouldn’t say he was healed, by last night he just had stuffy sinuses and what’s better for stuffy sinuses than some spicy food?

So we headed over to Las Margaritas, our favorite loval Mexican joint (we have 6 to choose from in a 5-mile radius from our home):

Sorry this so blurry. I got that new camera I was jonesing for for Christmas and I’m still trying to figure it out. At this point, an old man taking an evening stroll through town was behind me asking me why I was taking pictures of the concrete. I think I mumbled something or other about “inspiration” and hoped that would get him to shuffle on, but he just stood there, so I packed up the camera and didn’t get a better photo. I can’t work under such scrutiny.

Since one of my resolutions was to take more everday life type of photos with my snazzy little camera, I thought this would be the perfect place to give it a try. The WMD wasn’t too mortified when I pulled it out. I think he was even a bit amused.

But it didn’t last long:

He’d kill me if he knew I put this up, but he never reads my blog. Ha, ha, ha.

At this point I put the camera down because really, how many photos do you need to see of the WMD eating chips and salsa? Not to mention the fact that he was ingesting them at a high rate of speed and I was a pregnant woman in desperate need of Mexican food. I had to intervene on behalf of the little WMD and get some Mexican in my belly.

And then this came (insert voices of heavenly choir):

I don’t know what it is about their rice, but I always order a double portion and load it down with salsa. That and a couple of tacos and I’m a happy girl. And the WMD was good enough to wait for me to take four photos before he touched his food. I never doubted his intelligence.

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Long Time, No See

It’s been so long since I last blogged and I’ve missed it. Believe it or not, in my time off I thought of a lot of you that read regularly quite often and was tempted to jump back on the wagon before the New Year. But, a couple of things kept me from actually doing that. First it was the extreme fatigue and then it was the all-day nausea. Have you guessed it yet?

We’re having a baby!

Taking time to be quiet was a total rouse. While I’m a big proponent of quiet time, I really was just afraid that I’d spill the beans somehow and we really, really, really wanted to be able to tell our families that we’re expecting in person. Since that couldn’t happen until we traveled home for Christmas, I just decided to go silent for the six weeks I had to wait.

And let me tell you, those were a hard six weeks (and then some). I didn’t know someone could puke so many times in one day and survive. Alas.

We’re due at the end of June. We’ve had two doctor’s appointments and an ultrasound already and everything has looked good so far. I never imagined that when it came my turn to be pregnant (because when you live in a seminary community and your married for more than a year and still childless, you feel like you’re way late to the parenthood party), that I’d be excited for every doctor’s appointment. Instead, I’ve found that I’m usually terrified that they’ll find something wrong. I’ve been told that worry won’t stop until I’m dead. Gee, thanks for the info. But, now that I’m closing in on 16 weeks, I’m feeling more confident that this one’s a goody.

I would post a photo of my tiny baby bump, but really, I just look chubby and nobody wants to see that.

Believe me.

I feel chubby too, but that’s probably because I’ve been unable to work out for 8 weeks (!!!!) due to, you guessed it, nausea. For a lifelong gym rat, two months without a workout feels like an eternity. But then again, apathy also seems to be another symptom of the first trimester, so who cares if my hips are growing faster than my tummy!

I don’t plan to make this blog a baby blog, but then again, as our lives change, so will this blog and frankly, this is one mother of a change (no pun intended). I do have a few crafty projects up my sleeve to share with you and we plan on selling the house in the next year, so we’ll have lots of home improvement posts to add. Oh, and we’re planning on moving next year when Matthew’s done with school. He wants to do his Master’s degree at a seminary in Kentucky.

Yes, Kentucky.

But we’ll probably live in Indiana. And then we won’t be Yankees anymore.

We’ll just be normal.

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