Skip to main content

The blogging is back!

I was sitting on the couch last night, while Tom played his new football game on the PS3, and Gracie jumped onto the couch and snuggled into my lap. She gazed up at me and gave me a few sweet kisses, and then nestled her head down and went to sleep. "You never get over her, do you?" Tom asked, seeing the glow of love on my face for this sweet, silly dog. "No, I don't," I replied, and Gracie chose that moment to tilt her head straight back and give me another kiss.

It isn't the big gifts from the Lord that shock me the most, but the small ones. That he cares about guiding us in our life decisions and making use of us for His Kingdom seems easier to grasp than the fact that He delights in making me this happy by a pretty little cocker spaniel.

I worry sometime what kind of mother I will be; babies seem such high maintenance at times, and I worry that motherhood will become a burden rather than a joy. But if I take to it like I've taken to dog ownership, I think I'll be fine. I treasure every moment I have with these dogs, and I honestly have never once felt that they were a burden to us. I'm just so insanely grateful that we have two creatures that bring us so much freaking joy. It is really unbelievable.

As far as an update on our lives: we are moving in 3 weeks, we have a great rental house in Pasadena, I have a job at a christian high school as a chemistry teacher, and our house is about 3 miles from both my job and Fuller. I vacillate between being crazy grateful for the ways thing have fallen into place so far, yet scared to death about the things yet to come. How will we pay tuition? Will I be a good teacher? How will we pay for gas and food and bills, let alone our rent? Can I really teach students every day for a year? Will they actually learn anything? Will they hate me? And so on... but every day, I'm reminded again that the Lord is good, and he will provide our daily bread. Just like he has so many times before. And He'll even throw in some extras, like puppies that kiss and snuggle and cause me to erupt in loads of joyous laughter every single day.

Comments

  1. Sommer West, MPHAugust 21, 2008 at 9:35 AM

    Yay for the return of the blog. I've missed it very much!

    Mostly I miss you though! Call tonight if you have time....!!!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Olivia Marilyn Rich

Hi friends! Looks like I blogged in 2018 a total of...zero times. I did start a lot of drafts, but none made it to publishing. I'm hoping to maybe get back into blogging (like, at least more than zero times in 2019), but I realized that until I can give any life updates, I need to post SOMETHING about baby #2's arrival. According to my blog, I'm still 9 weeks pregnant with her, but she is now 15 months old. So here is the completed version of her birth story that I attempted to write last year. In order to tell Livvie's birth story, I need to record her pregnancy. It was hard to write about during it, harder to write about it after it. I'm feeling less connected to it now- it is a hazy memory of misery in my mind. I know it was awful, but I can't quite remember just how awful. I guess this is how people have more babies, as the memories are slowly swallowed up by the heavenliness of the baby outside of the womb. The most difficult part of my pregnancies is...
Post a Comment
Read more

'Til We Finally Meet

When we awoke you were not to be You never swam in our blue sea Now you’ve gone to different oceans Than the one we floated our hopes in When we lost our baby, I did not know how to grieve. So I didn't. I treated it like a failed cycle and put my hand to the plow, pulling my heart and body toward the next thing. We will get pregnant again, I told myself. That will make it all better. Lets pretend this never happened. You were a breaking in the clouds We barely said these things aloud There was a question you were the answer We heard music you were the dancer But in the in-between time, waiting for my body to recover so we could begin treatment again, it eventually became too much to ignore that we had a child. Two children, I guess, though my mind can't possibly comprehend the existence of that other one, the empty sac that never grew beyond four or five weeks. But that beautiful miracle on the ultrasound scream, the sound of the doctor exclaiming "There's a baby with ...
5 comments
Read more

IVF update

We completed our first IVF cycle (minus the transfer)! For those are interested, here's an update on how it went. Stims I was looking forward to the stimming process, with all the sciency needles and vials. And it was fun for awhile, until my follicles (eggs) started growing. Then it started to get old and very uncomfortable. But I responded so well! For our IUI's, I usually had very little response at the first ultrasound. But for my first IVF ultrasound, I already had a great number of follicles growing with an E2 (estrogen level) of 937! And then things just ballooned. Two days later, I had 27 follicles. Then 39. I triggered with 39 follicles and an E2 of 4540. One of the reasons they pushed the number of follicles was due to my left ovary, which they were concerned they might not be able to reach for retrieval. For most of the stimming process, it was hidden underneath my uterus. So they wanted to make sure my right had a good amount of mature follicles, and it di...
3 comments
Read more