Family news

Well, it seems rather hard for us to believe still, but it looks like this little guy

may be a BIG brother soon! That's right... I'm pregnant. We're still kind of reeling from the news... totally unexpected, but we're also getting pretty excited.

In the Bible, Mary "treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart." I treasure up all these things and write about them on my blog. So in that spirit, I thought I would share my initial thoughts when I first was processing all this. Here is what I wrote back on June 14th:

This week I discovered, to my great shock, that I am pregnant.

My first thought was that Pete and I clearly have no idea what we're doing when it
comes to family planning. I think we must have been holding the family
planning book upside-down when we read it. For a year awhile back we tried
to get pregnant, and couldn't, and now, during the last few years when
we've been trying quite hard to not get pregnant, we've ended up with 2
pregnancies.

My second thought was that this might be the end of a dream of
ours to adopt a baby - or two or three. I guess we don't know anything
definite about all that -- I still feel like I'm waterskiing blindfolded through
life -- but there is a bit of grieving that happens with the realization that it
will be indefinitely postponed. We had thought our third child would be
coming from China. Turned out he was born in Matthews, NC. And we
had thought our fourth child would come from Vietnam, or India, or Ethiopia or
someplace like that.... but now we may have another Matthews baby on our
hands.

And so my third thought was that I am VERY glad this is all in God's
hands. Clearly He knows what He is doing, and He is building our family in
just the right way. In fact, as I was grumbling about all my confusion and
lack of control in all this, I sat down to do my Bible study workbook. I
opened the study guide that I've been going through ("Stepping Up" by Beth
Moore) and found that the passage for the day was Psalm 127.* Very
weird. And very good for me to hear.

And my fourth thought was that it's so strange when a women discovers she's pregnant. It's not like any other event or occurrence in life. You instantly go from "mother of x children" to "mother of x+1 children," permanently altering your
identity.

So, it's been a weird week.

* Psalm 127 includes:
Unless the Lord builds the house,
its builders labor in vain...
Sons are a heritage from the Lord,
children a reward frmo him.
Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
are sons born in one's youth.
Blessed is the man
whose quiver is full of them..."