WHEW! It's been a while!

I've taken a little hiatus from writing because things have been happening like CRAZY on the home front!

Tomorrow, I will be 28 or 29 weeks pregnant (depending on who you ask) with our first little one! I have no idea where the last seven months have gone! And I'm certainly not ready for the next couple of months to come to an end either.

My whole life, more than anything else, I wanted to be a wife and a mom. I've got almost 5 years under my belt as a wife and it's honestly been better than I could have imagined! So I thought the process of becoming a mom would be just as blissful...well, not entirely.

While I'm grateful that I've missed out on the ugliest physical pregnancy side effects (yay for no morning sickness!), there's been a whole mess of emotional disasters that I could have done without. The first few months were lots of worry about my baby. The next few months were spent being terrified of becoming a parent and having to create an entire person...one who is kind and hardworking and loving and all the other things that we want our children to become. That's a huge task! One time, I literally woke up in the middle of the night in a panic because I didn't know how to be the mother of a 20 year old. (Lucky for me, you get 20 years of on-the-job experience before that point!)

Finally, somewhere in Month 6, I found my peace. We decided to find out the gender (BOY!!), the kicks became something that we could really feel and I found myself moving from a constant state of panic to enjoying being pregnant and looking forward to bringing up this incredible little man! Now here we are, just a little more than 10 weeks from the big day and they only thing bringing me down is the idea of not being pregnant anymore! I love having him in here, all cozy and squirmy. I'm not quite ready to give that up yet. (Though you may want to check back in about 8 weeks and see where I stand.)

So now, I'm just enjoying my days of all these sweet kicks and rolls, working hard to finish the blanket I've been knitting since before I was pregnant and trying to get all the other pre-baby "stuff" together. We're getting down to crunch time!

"I prayed for this child"

Having a baby is huge. It's a great big deal and it can be terrifying. It's also pretty arrogant. It's the assumption that you and your spouse, of all the people in the world, are qualified to create a human being. It's assuming that you can mold a person to be polite and sensible and kind, not that obnoxious woman at the grocery store or the jerk in a traffic jam.
There are no little feet pitter pattering in our home yet, but I have been in the habit of praying for our future children. Parents are always praying for their children, as they should be. But what about those of us who are still waiting for our little "borrowed blessings"? (I'll explain that term later)
I've been working on a knit blanket for our precious bundle, while I wait for him or her to finally appear. And while I knit, I pray. I love Hannah's prayer in 1 Samuel 1:27-28. "I prayed for this child...now I give him to the Lord." While my fingers work to knit together my humble creation, I imagine our God knitting together my child. And I am amazed.
I pray that whatever children we have will give themselves over to God, wholly and without hesitation. But I also pray that I will be able to give over my children. That I will be able to acknowledge that the God loves them so much more than I will ever imagine, even as a mother. I can't wait for the day that I take this blanket that I made with my own hands and wrap it around my child that the God of the universe made. I feel like I'll be wrapping my child in the physical evidence of my prayers. How wonderful will that be??