I had a whole bunch of pictures taken this morning of Baby #2. This is a very unfortunate experience to have to go to alone, because it is AMAZING! The lady operating the sonogram is somewhat less impressed seeing as how she does this every day, so you keep looking around wanting to exchange a look of awe with someone who thinks this is as incredible as you do. The baby was moving around like crazy. I saw him (or her, but I'll use "him" for the sake of avoiding "it") kicking his legs, sucking on his fingers, flipping around and around, rubbing his face, yawning, banging his fists together.... My favorite move though sort of resembled that move that martial artists use when they're getting themselves from their backs to a standing position by swinging their legs forward and arching their backs - it kept looking like he was trying to do that. Kind-of like an inch worm but on his back. I came home with 12 pictures, but they all disappointingly look nothing like the clarity I felt like i saw on the screen. So I'll spare you trying to figure out which part of white fuzz is the baby in all 12 pictures, and I'll just post two of them here. One is just his hand with his fingers outstretched waving hello to his mommy. The other one is his freakishly skeleton looking face (on the right) with big eye sockets and his mouth wide open. He kept opening and shutting it as though he were talking to us ("help im stuck in this tiny place! let me out! let me out!")
The last few days I’ve been living vicariously through Jason Bourne. I was looking for a book to read that was purely entertainment instead of informational. We don’t own a whole lot of entertainment books that I haven’t already read, but Keith has the Bourne series so he recommended I read The Bourne Identity. I almost refused because I don’t like reading books after I’ve seen the movie. I feel like it ruins all the imagination factor plus you already know what’s going to happen. I was desperate enough though to pick up a novel with a cheesy Victorian romance type of cover. I only have this book because it was written by George MacDonald and came in a box of George MacDonald books I borrowed from my Dad from when he ordered just about every MacDonald book he could get his hands on. If I can find a pic of the cover you’ll see why this particular book had gone untouched. I tried to give it a shot, but the first page started out with a description of hills and flowers and such and after a paragraph of this boring nonsense I traded it in for Jason Bourne. Now Keith told me it was different from the movie because it had a lot more detail - but after reading the book I fail to see how the book cover can say “Now a major motion picture” – when I don’t think there is anything that happens in the movie that happens in the book other than the main character getting amnesia. They have a few of the same character names such as Marie – but how did Marie go from being a Canadian Doctor of Economics whom he kidnaps at gunpoint, beats up, slaps around, and eventually greatly utilizes her expertise in banks and finances - to a German gypsy that he pays for a ride and she’s got nothing better to do than to get a crush on some guy she doesn’t know, flirt her way up to his apartment, and then tag along for the ride? I mean Jason Bourne’s not even really an assassin in the book! Had I read the book before the movie I may have been quite disappointed in the movie. But all in all it was a good book, and it was a good movie. Just don’t expect the two to have any plot correlation. As soon as I have another entire day or two to waste I will move on to the second book (Yes I have trouble putting a book down at all once I’ve started) and I will see if there is any possible way the second one has anything at all in common with the second movie. So far the end of the first book sets up the second in a way that would completely contradict the events of the second movie. So this time I will pick up The Bourne Supremacy with a completely open imagination and zero expectations.
Due to cooler templates and user friendliness, I have moved my blog to this blogspot address. Sorry to those who'd commented on previous blogs as those did not transition.
I went to the park this afternoon with my stopwatch and my jogging goal for the day. But this time I also had another goal.
I’ve been going to the park a lot this past month and every time I go there is a little old lady walking around the track in her slippers. This is slightly unusual, but what is even more strange about it is that I never go to the park on the same days or even the same time of day. Morning, afternoon, or evening this lady always seems to be walking the track when I am. We smile and say a customary “Good-morning” (or whatever time of day it is,) but that has been the extent of it.
Sometimes when I jog at night I have trouble getting to sleep because I’m still wound up. This was the case a couple nights ago. As I lay awake, I couldn’t stop wondering about this cute little old lady in her flimsy brownish slippers that showed a hint of having been pink at some point in time. So I decided I ought to try and get to know her and find out her story. When I come to the point of crossing paths with her, I’m going to place a mental pause on the dictatorial watch’s flashing green countdown and slow down enough to try and talk. Wouldn’t you know it, for the first time in a month she wasn’t at the park when I went.
I feel like I’m being shown a lot of missed opportunities lately. When my brother and his wife were going through a rough week, my husband’s immediate response was that we should go to Colorado and help out for a bit. Sounded great, but then I started thinking that maybe they didn’t want to talk about it so I shouldn’t call just yet… and they actually have a bunch of family around so we might be more of a hindrance than a help...and so on. Turns out had we called right away they would have gladly welcomed the idea and we would have had an opportunity to really help family in a hard time. We have really nice neighbors right next door. When we moved in, we thought we should have them over for dinner sometime and really get to know them on a deeper level. It’s sad how “sometime” can turn into two years of never actually going through with that plan. What’s even worse is when out of the blue our neighbor tells us that his wife is moving out and we had no clue they were having problems. Before I even got the chance to see her again she’s packed up and left and 6 months later we still hadn’t seen her once even though she has three kids that were apparently left with the husband. What happened? What went wrong? What’s going on with her? We’re still on such superficial pleasantry status that I don’t have the right (or maybe just the guts) to ask these questions. These neighbors are the drinking, smoking, cursing out their children at the top of their lungs kind of people – yet they go above and beyond in doing acts of kindness towards us and put our neighborliness to shame. How have we shown Jesus to these people who live right next door?
And now my little old lady has gone missing.
My Grandpa died of cancer back in 1995. My Dad said that when my Grandpa knew he was dying, he was expressing great regret for all the time he wasted, and all the opportunities missed for telling people about God. From everything I remember and have been told about my Grandpa – he was the kind of man who didn’t just seize every opportunity he had, but he went looking for opportunities to share Jesus with people every chance he had. It’s astounding the amount of lives that he affected. Yet here he is at the end of his life wishing he did more. That’s stuck with me. If at the end of his life he felt like he’d wasted so much time – how am I going to feel about what I’ve done with my life? I live in a constant state of seeing opportunities plain as day in front of me, and thinking “I should do something about that.”
Someday. Tomorrow. Next time.
He who knows what he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.
We listened to a sermon recently by Rob Bell that helped to poke at the regrets I’ve been feeling. He told of scenarios of evil in the world. Christians are seeing these situations and crying out to God “Where are you?” And in this illustration God’s response to man is “Where are you?” God has chosen us to be the message in this world of evil. We are not just the vessel carrying this message to the world, we ARE the message. Our lives are the message. Our reaching out to people, our demonstrating God’s love, our doing the things that Jesus would have done in the face of the evils of this world – poverty, pain, suffering. We are the message. We are God in this world. What are we telling people with our lives?
These are just some things that have been on my heart. I haven’t done anything about it yet. But maybe next time I go to the park, I will cross paths with a little old lady in tattered slippers.
Recently Keith was searching for something under the guest bed in the spare room, when he suddenly called to me "We've got a mouse in here!" A mouse? I was shocked. We live in a neighborhood in a city, we're not supposed to get mice, right?
Expressing this sentiment provided Keith with yet another opportunity to poke fun at the different sides of town we grew up on. When Keith lived in Tucson growing up, it was in the neighborhood we're currently living in - on the south east side of Tucson. I grew up on the northwest side - the nice side of town. Not quite to Oro Valley (the nicer side of town) and definitely not the foothills (the really rich part of Tucson), but definitely nicer than most everything south of us. Anytime I mention an item or experience from my childhood that Keith doesn’t relate to, he explains it by saying "We couldn’t afford that kind of thing on my side of town." He enjoys this type of teasing merely because I highly resent the implication that I am a snob or excessive. On the contrary, my personality type prides myself in practicality and being a good old-fashioned cheapskate. (You taught me well, Dad.) When Keith and I met, he was highly into brand names and wanting the best of the best in everything. Excessiveness under the guise of quality. I, on the other hand, would lean way to the other side where I would buy something so cheap, for "practicality," that I would probably have to replace it 10 times as often as something of slight more expense.
So back to the story at hand - Apparently mice do occasionally trickle into some neighborhoods in Tucson. And one miraculously made it past the abounding number of neighborhood cats that like to sleep in our yard and got into our house. I decided to catch it. So we tore apart the room looking for it. No where to be found. Next day it's under the kitchen sink. We think we have it trapped, but pull everything out to find its not there. Next day we see it behind the aquarium, and chase it into the back room, with Elliot's room and our room carefully blockaded from mouse entrance. Tear it apart again, but still don’t find it. We finally gave up and went back into our bedroom. Keith's getting ready for bed and says to me "I'll be fine as long as nothing crawls over me in the middle of the ni-AHHHHH!" Yup - the mouse had made it into our bedroom closet, and ran across Keith's feet right in the middle of his ironic self-assuring statement. "That's it Shawna - you need to go buy a trap tomorrow!"
I know to most people, mice are disgusting little creatures. But I still see them as little lives. I've always been highly sensitive to the sanctity of life. Any life. (Excluding cockroaches and mosquitoes, which everyone knows aren't really lives, but spawn of satan in insect form.) When I was little, I locked myself in the bathroom and cried for hours because none of adults seemed to care that my brother was outside maliciously killing ants on purpose! Before the days when Joel and I were given weeding to do as a chore, I used to pull up occasional weeds by the roots and plant them somewhere else or in pots in my room so my Dad wouldn’t kill them with his weed sprayer. I remember watching a Harrison Ford movie in the theater (Patriot Games?) and crying because of the numerous amounts of no-named bad guys getting shot and killed. They were people too - with parents and possibly a wife and children at home who were now going to be fatherless. Didn't anyone understand the magnitude of snuffing out a life? And finally, once in my Uncle Art's house, I reached down without a thought and snatched up a mouse that was running across the floor, because I knew he had mouse traps set up around the house. My Mom is an amazing woman to put up with me bringing that mouse into the house and keeping it as a pet.
So I went out and got a mouse trap. A mouse trap that consisted of a little plastic box with a swinging door that could only be pushed open by the outside. I humane mouse trap. I baited it and even rubbed peanut butter on the outside of the door to attract it by scent like it suggested. A few days went by. No mouse. So I gave in and let Keith set up the other kind of trap. The head squishing kind. We set it right next to my humane trap - I'm still hoping the mouse chooses mine. We set it up and were in the living room talking when, probably not even an hour later, *snap!* Keith and I look at each other wide eyed. I'm horrified. Keith goes to check the trap. "It was probably a cockroach that set it off," I say to assure myself that I did not just participate in the killing of a little life. Nope. It was the mouse. Keith tells me not to look and a few minutes later he asks where I keep the bleach. My brain gets a little warm with emotion, and as a byproduct my eyes get a little sweaty. "I feel rotten!" I announce. Keith looks at me and laughs. Not a mean laugh, but I understand its somewhat funny that I'm so worked up about it. I laugh too, but at the same time I'm shouting "It's not funny! That was a little life! Haven't you seen Cinderella? That could have been Gus-Gus!"
So there it is. I can be an overly sensitive girly-girl who cries over a mouse. During high school and college, I managed to completely callous over this sensitivity to points where I honestly didn’t feel anything towards things that I should. But in the end I still have it in me. The extremist who doesn’t give a rip about some people's problems that I don't think are important enough for them to get all upset about - but who can go into depression for days because of a stranger's pain over something I find of infinite value. I believe we shouldn't become desensitized to the sanctity of life. I believe Life is of infinite value.
I've heard that parents tend to over worry with their first child. Boil the pacifier every time it drops, bathe every day, sanitize everything, freak out if anything random starts to find it's way towards baby's mouth. I developed a good dose of maternal instinct when Elliot was born, but the germa-phobia and excessive worry never took over. Keith asked me the other day what I think we'll be like with a second child when we've already started out so relaxed with Elliot. What's he sucking on? I don't know but it doesn't look too dirty. Does he need a bath? Nope - I think he had one within the last week or two.
Elliot is starting to crawl all over the house and be into everything so we're starting to talk about baby proofing. Meanwhile we've been going to a Love and Logic parenting class at a church out here. In our last class the leader made a comment about how parents control their children's environment so much that they don't allow them to learn from the natural consequences of things. Her example? Baby puts something in the outlet. It won't kill them, but it'll hurt enough to teach them not to do it again. But parents deprive their children from learning that lesson by covering up the outlets.
Ok so maybe I have a little more worrying in my nature than that. I think I'll still cover my outlets. So where exactly do you draw the line? Elliot climbed/fell out of his crib the other week. I imagine it hurt (although he was crawling calmly on the floor when I went in and discovered it), but we still lowered the crib just in case he didn't quite learn from the consequence the first time. Even if he his one tough little boy, it protects my heart from breaking at the thought that my baby may have been hurt or scared for even a moment over such a large fall. But with many things to come, I imagine I will have to suffer the parental empathy as I allow Elliot to suffer the consequences of actions he must learn from. I just pray God will give me the wisdom to find that balance.
