Welcome to the world

Baby Jeff was born on May 5th (almost May 4th). The Lord gave us a good labor and delivery at a wonderful birth center in Chapel Hill, NC. And He worked it out for my Mom to arrive the day before so that she could stay with the girls here while we were gone.


Welcome to the world, little fellow.

such a soft, round head
such a little man face
whom will you grow up to be?
welcome home
to our imperfect family
and all our inconsistencies.
O may God's grace be greater!
who are we
to be entrusted with another soul
granted one more child to hold,
to train, to nurture, then let go -
so quickly they say time will go

O may I not be so consumed
with laundry, meals, and daily life
that I ignore my little ones
lose my chance to mother them

baby soon

I'm at 39 weeks pregnant now, and feeling ever bigger and weighed down... harder to get off the couch, tie shoes, etc. :) Since Emily & Katherine were each a week or so late, I'm not counting on the baby coming on time, and actually I hope he doesn't, since neither my mom nor mother-in-law will be here till my due date. At my visit today, the midwife said everything sounds fine, looks fine, etc. Praise the Lord - and I learn to leave in His hands what I can't control. Maybe every mom fears problems with the baby or delivery, but He knows.

Kid News - April 2008

Here's an update on our girls from the past few months...

We got some snow on February 14th. We don't get much here, and I think that was our last snow of winter (we had a little snow a few times earlier in the year). Emily doesn't like walking in it, so she stays on the driveway or sidewalk. Katherine loves the snow, though.

tasting snow

We were happy to see our favorite squirrel Notch back (picture is from March 13th). She's been visiting only sporadically the last several months, and every time she don't see her for awhile, we wonder if she has died. The first time we got a picture of her was in the spring of 2002 (as an adult), so we assume she was born in 2001. She got an ear wound as a young squirrel (hence the name), which is the only way we can identify her. Well, that, and the fact that she will climb our screen door to get our attention ("Feed me!") and will eat sunflower seeds put up on the railing for her. We'll be sad when she isn't around any more. She has actually come quite regularly this spring.

On April 8th we got to go to the Asheboro Zoo with a friend (Susan Davenport) - something I had wanted to do before the baby's born, and finally arranged a day to do it. She insisted on pushing the stroller all day, and was a big help in many ways. Here are a few pictures from that day.

We ate lunch after we arrived (before going into the zoo), and the Canada geese were coming up behind us begging for food (sorry geese, we're eating it). The kids weren't too thrilled about their honking unexpectedly, but they liked seeing them.

Mountain lion

"Miss Susan" pushing the stroller

Kids' play area made of things that looked like bugs and plants

Probably the girls' favorite thing to see was the sea lions, since they would swim and play right in front of our faces at the window. We stayed there awhile watching, and were even there when they got fed.





Then there was the "Kid Zone" where kids could do various things. Here is the puppet show gazebo with puppets to try. First it was just me and Katherine (with Emily watching from the stroller), but then she wanted in on the fun too.








The Kid Zone also included a nice sand play area, which both girls enjoyed very much. In God's providence, not very many other children were there, so they had the place to themselves most of the time they were playing.





We also got to see the zebras, giraffes, and ostriches, which share a habitat. I had never realized how enormous the ostriches were (their backs probably taller than the zebras) or how tall the giraffes were (I think a zebra could almost walk under the giraffe). It was fun to see in person.



Here we are trying to see birds in the aviary. They had several scarlet ibises (sorry - we didn't get a picture of them though), among others.

Meerkat

The elephants share a nice big habitat with rhinoceroses, kudu (see second picture), ostriches, and maybe something else that I can't remember. The zoo had just finished and opened this new habitat area several days before we went.

Emily:
Current favorite phrase: "right here" - which applies to everything... pointing to buttons on Mommy's clothes - "button right here." "Sit right here." Her spoken vocabulary is growing rapidly, not just in number of words, but in ability to string them together into longer phrases and sentences.

She loves to do whatever Katherine happens to be doing. Favorite library book: "Daisy's Favorite Things" which includes a page of Daisy (a duckling) bouncing on a lily pad; when she gets to that page, she will say "Daisy boun, boun, boun".

She knows that lots of words refer to colors, but doesn't seem to know what words go with what colors; so she'll bring over her bead necklace and say, "puple-blu?" or "geen-lellow?" to ask you to tell her what ones are what color. But sometimes she seems to repeat the wrong word on purpose (after telling her a few beads, she might seem to deliberately say a different color than the one you told her it was).

Grandma (who visited over Easter) showing Emily the colors of the beads on her necklace

I had to get a token picture of Emily wearing this dress. It was given to my Mom for one of my sisters when they were little (they were given matching dresses).



Katherine:
Chronic mispronunciations: "moffering" (offering at church). "stomp" (tree stump at the end of the sidewalk - marking the turn-around point of our walks). A recent one was "Mexican tape" (masking tape).

Favorite library book: Sector 7 by David Wiesner - a story of a cloud that takes a boy with him to the "cloud dispatch center". That has led to Katherine's calling a blanket of hers, her "friendly cloud" which goes on adventures with her, "takes care of her", plays with her. Cotton from packing material becomes "clouds" and gets strewn all around the living room. Other blankets of Katherine's become other "clouds" to go with her "friendly cloud." Emily even calls the main blanket the "cloud".

Katherine with her "clouds"

She also likes me to take pictures of various things she does, like Lego creations:

decorating a boat with Lego man heads...

Katherine enjoys playing with bubble wrap. Here she is with a path of bubble wrap, stomping on it to make them pop:



Both Katherine and Emily enjoy playing outside, and many times I have thanked God for a fenced-in back yard, such that they can go out and play by themselves without my needing to keep an eye on them as much.

They enjoy playing with sunflower seed hulls, dry leaves, sticks, dirt - and especially water, mixing it with stuff to make "mustard", pouring it on the plants and into bottles, etc. It's a blessing to have a window of springtime when the mosquitoes aren't active yet, the weather's not too hot, and they can go play out there when they want to.




Well, I'm sure there's more to say, but I can't remember at the moment. Kids grow and change so much. It's hard to capture in a few words what they are like.

the Perfection meter

Still I struggle with relating to God by works rather than by the work of Christ. Living as if there were a "perfection meter" in God's eyes; the fuller it is, the more He loves me, and the more I am happy. The lower it goes, the more I feel guilty, and the more angry God is.

But for those in Christ, it is His perfection meter that is referred to. His meter is full, perfectly complete. He has fully satisfied God's justice and His law. God is perfectly satisfied with Him, and His love for Jesus never fails or diminishes. And Jesus' Perfection meter is laid on top of mine, so that when God looks at me, He sees Jesus only. He loves me as He loves Jesus (wow! - I cannot comprehend that... Jn.17:23). And therefore my joy can be full! (Jn.16:24).

more from Job

When tempted to ask God an accounting of his deeds to you - why things have happened to you as they have -

He says to Job,
Did you create the Heavens?
Can you control the weather?
Can you make it rain, or direct the wind where to go?
Can you make it cold or hot?
Can you direct the lightning where to strike, and cause the thunder to roar after it?
Can you keep the stars in their courses?

Therefore do not question the God who created all things, and who upholds and sustains them all by the word of His power. He orchestrates every moment of your life; and He always does all things well. He may never tell you the "why"s of your life. But surrender to your status as creature, and be content with your place.

Your goal in life - if you are His - is not first, to have perfect health, or a great retirement, or a job with no trials. Your goal is to glorify God here, now, where He has put you. To live your life unto Him. And by His grace, that is an achievable goal!

lessons from Job

Sometimes it seems hard for me to read the book of Job and know what to think of the different characters and what they say. But some things we learn for certain:

God is the sovereign controller of all things. He does as He pleases in Heaven and earth. We as creatures have no right to demand of God an explanation for His actions, and He might never disclose to us why He has put us through deep waters.

Circumstances cannot tell us if God loves us; we cannot read God's mind toward us by our circumstances. Job's friends read his circumstances to mean that Job had brought on his trials by sin (which was untrue); Job read his circumstances to mean that God was unjust (which was also untrue).

But we can always know who God is: that God is always wise, always just, always loving, no matter what the circumstances seem to say otherwise. We may not understand God's ways in this life. But He will always in the end be proven to be the unchanging, faithful God, who does all things well.

Kid News - February 2008

It's been awhile since a Kids Update. Discretionary time with both kids in bed and me not too tired seems in short supply. Where to start...

Katherine is now 3 years, 8 months old. She continues to be her fun personality. One day a couple months ago she saw a squirrel flicking its tail nervously, and David told her it was worrying about something, like a cat or dog nearby. So for awhile, she would "worry" - bounce up and down as if she were flicking her tail like a squirrel, and find something silly to "worry" about. It became another game with her and Daddy - "I'm worrying about... the birds! What are you worrying about, Daddy?"

She had been looking forward to Christmas time and having the tree up and lights on it (she loves Christmas lights!) since probably last Christmas. I had told her we wouldn't put up the tree until December. We were doing stuff with a calendar, so she ended up learning the months of the year, and we would say all the names of the months till December. Once it got close, she was almost counting down the days, so I made sure we got the tree up on Dec.1. Well, it's an artificial tree, so we at least got it out of the attic and assembled. Dec.1 being Saturday, the lights didn't go on till Monday the 3rd, and the ornaments the next day. But after the tree was up (before anything else was on the tree), Katherine took some decorating into her own hands:

Duplos make good ornaments, apparently

For probably 2 weeks after that, one of her favorite things to do was to rearrange the ornaments on the tree, which she called "shaping up ornaments." She has liked Christmas lights from the time she was old enough to notice them (2 Christmases ago, around 18 months old). She has always liked colors, and knew the names of her colors by that time, and would point out the "blu" lights and "yelo" and whatever other colors she saw.

It's amazing how quickly you forget things though. If I hadn't made notes to myself about the above, I would have forgotten about her "worrying" game. Anyway...

She is learning to read using a "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" book, which I finally bought my own copy of. And we are slowly working our way through a math book. She loves to do both of those (whether for the sake of learning, or just having Mommy's somewhat undivided attention, or both, I'm not sure). But Mommy doesn't always get to those. We're doing well to get to it 2-3 times / week. But for now, doing anything is a good thing.

Bouncing with Daddy

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Emily. She's now 18 months old. She seems to be able to do physical things easily or intuitively (in contrast to her Mommy and her sister, who both find it not very intuitive). At 14 months old she could climb up on Katherine's single bed, and climb into her booster chair at the table. At 15 months she was stepping up steps (while holding onto something) rather than crawling up them, and at 16 months she was learning to step down as well.

She can feed herself with a spoon quite well now.

She has her stuffed puppy and her blanket which she wants to have when she sleeps, and other times as well. For awhile, though not recently, she wanted to always be wearing a jacket and shoes. Shoes would be one of the first things she asked for in the morning.

She is more interested in computer things than Katherine is - as in, the parts and the plugs and the buttons. Katherine liked those too, but Emily looks like one that might follow Daddy around in his computer work and put parts together.

She's also more of a "dolly" girl than Katherine is. She likes having a dolly to play with. She tries to make the dollhouse dollies sit in their chairs, so that the whole family is sitting on something. But she gets frustrated that she often can't make them sit in something without falling out (doesn't quite get the hang of bending the legs properly, etc. yet).

Playing peek-a-boo with her dolly, which she has covered with a blanket and then would peek under the blanket and say "peek-a-boo". Actually, she has been saying "peek-boo" for awhile, and just today it was coming out as "pee-bo-koo" which was cute.

Both of the girls enjoy Legos. Katherine can build things now. Emily tried to build occasionally, but can't quite line up the bumps right to make pieces stick together. Her favorite thing to do is to find Lego people and take them apart, and occasionally put them back together. Interestingly, like Katherine at that age, she doesn't want them to have hats or hair on their heads, or anything unusual on their bodies either (e.g. life jackets). So she comes for help to get things off of her Lego men's heads, or to get me to help her put one in a Lego horse for her. Maybe it's a dolly equivalent of Legos - instead of dressing and undressing dollies, she's rearranging Lego man body parts to have different shirts and pants together. Katherine still likes to do that too sometimes, though she mostly will build things instead.

Emily can communicate well now. I don't think she's quite as verbal as Katherine at that age, but not far behind. But she can say many words and make herself understood, or take you to what she wants.

She also seems to have a good short-term memory of where something is (in contrast to Katherine at that age). So if you ask her, "where's your dolly?" she will generally know exactly where she left it and go look for it.

Katherine, on the other hand, doesn't remember as well where she put (or dropped) something, but she has an extremely good memory for anything she hears, sees, or experiences. She loves music, and has learned bunches of songs. We've gotten a lot of "educational" (and Scripture) songs, and most of them have a good beat and tune. She likes to bounce on the Vitalizer to her music.

Bouncing vigorously to one of her songs

Katherine also has extremely good vision. I wouldn't be surprised if it's 20/20 or thereabouts. She can see clearly without glasses (with either eye, as best I can tell) what I can only see clearly with my glasses on. We haven't had her eyes checked yet, but I don't think she'll need glasses any time soon. Emily appears to have good vision too, though I'm not sure yet how good. Probably better than mine.

Playing with Mommy's boots

Playing in the clean laundry

She's quite a "ham" and loves to do things for the purpose of being funny.

Like Katherine, she loves Grandma's cats, and kitties of all sorts (live or in pictures)

I guess that's all for now. Except to mention that little brother is due to be born in early May, Lord willing. I'm excited!