I am doing a bad job at trusting God. And feel like I am failing miserably...at everything. :(

SNOW!!!

It snowed yesterday!! Twice!! Brandon thought it was his birthday present from God. I know I will look back and laugh synically at myself in a few months for being so excited about the snow but...for now....it snowed!!!!! :)

not enough

I wear my baby in a sling right now. He is sleeping. I write this because I am happy he is in a sling sleeping...it has been a struggle. He does not like feeling cooped up. I don't know why. All this is completely irrelevant to my post. I just wanted to share it. :)

These past three weeks have been very difficult for me—for us as a family, really. There are difficulties I never calculated that I have had to face following the birth of our baby. For instance, nursing. Nursing is super duper hard!! I thought about nursing with anticipation before birth, thinking that once a baby is born your body naturally does everything it needs to do to nurse a baby with ease and how nice it would be for one's boobs to finally be useful for something! So not true. My first almost two weeks with Solomon were a soggy squirming screaming mess. Day and night I struggled just to be able to feed my poor baby. Not being able to perfectly and immediately meet your child's needs is very overwhelming to a mother. I could go on about all the different challenges having a baby introduces but I will spare you. My point is this: this baby thing is hard!

The words "not enough" have been going round and round my head for quite sometime now. I am not enough, Brandon is not enough, we are not enough, there is not enough time, I have not had enough sleep, I do not have enough hands...okay, I think you get the picture.

Before Brandon and I got married, I felt like I was just barely succeeding at life. After we got married, the before-married life seemed so much more simple and I felt like I was just barely succeeding at married life. Then we entered the real-world where men (and oftentimes women) have to work full time and we were so overwhelmed because suddenly, days went by and weeks went by and we could barely stay on top of everything. And then a baby was born. How are we ever to be enough, to do enough, to have enough, to give this little baby what he needs??

I learn painfully that sometimes being my own enough isn't what its all about. My struggle needs to be about accepting that instead of fighting it. and to be grateful God allows me to be insufficient so that I realize how much I need His grace.

Dear Readers,

I would LOVE to know who actually reads my blog so I have a request: if you see this post (assumedly because you check my blog and like to read what I write), please leave a comment letting me know.

Thanks!

I am grateful for the life I have. I wouldn't trade it with anyone else's.

the day he was born

I knew my baby was coming....soon. I could feel it in every ounce of my being but I tried my darnest to ignore the fact. Why? Because the more I thought about it the more agonizingly impatient I became. So I tried to live my life one day at a time, one moment at a time, staying busy with little odds and ends—trying to live in the moment.

I think pregnancy and childbirth are particularly difficult for a first time mom, at least from an emotional perspective. No matter how many books you read, or people you talk to, every day brings about so many unexpected and unfamiliar feelings and changes that you often feel confused and don't know what to do with yourself. I think this is especially true towards the end of one's pregnancy. The last few weeks before my baby was born, it was all I could do to not constantly ask "is this baby going to be a boy?" "how big is this baby inside of me?" "how much longer do I have to wait?" etc, etc. This was not helped at all by the fact my hormones and my body were both screaming, "its going to be soon!!!" How soon, however, I did not know. Soon, in pregnancy, is a term that can mean anything from a few hours to a few weeks.

Originally, I had wanted this baby to be born in November—near Brandon's birthday (on the 16th). I wanted us to be able to celebrate the two birthdays at the same time in years to come. But the beginning of October drew near and I realized this baby was going to be an October baby whether I liked it or not. Once I accepted that fact, I started getting impatient! October was October, so anytime was fine for me and since my daily life since moving to Topeka has been more or less occupied with waiting-for-a-baby (it would have been silly trying to get a job that late in pregnancy!) I figured sooner was better than later. I looked at our October calendar and started blocking out the dates: early October was just a bit too early for this baby to be born, mid-October Brandon had a conference in Kansas City he had to go to, late October was parent teacher conferences. Because Brandon would be trying to take a week of school off to be with us after the baby was born, I was hoping and hoping I would go into labor at a convenient time. I picked out the weekend of October 17th and 18th as the perfect time.

I could have panicked when my water broke the morning of Friday October 16th—Brandon was still in Kansas City at the conference. I texted my husband, told him not to worry, and that sometimes people's water breaks days before the baby is actually born. Within myself, however, my mind started whirling. What would I do if he didn't get home in time?? I had heard stories of people who were just walking around in the kitchen (just like me), their water broke, and then all of the sudden their baby was born. I didn't think this would be the case for me but who could know...?

I knew Brandon would be home by 5 that evening. I kept in contact with him all day long via texts letting him know I was still okay and had not experienced any contractions. My relief knew no bounds, however, when he walked in our front door at 4:30pm. At that point, I knew everything would be alright.

All this was rather funny in retrospect because that evening passed, the night, and Saturday morning with no contractions or any other change. I didn't feel too impatient, rather, that entire period of time felt very dream-like. Brandon and I had a lovely dinner, watched a movie, went to bed early, slept in late, ate a satisfying breakfast, went shopping for a bit, ate lunch out, and went shopping some more. It was just a bit after lunch and we were in Target when all of the sudden I realized, I needed to be home! Now! I had been feeling small irregular contractions going on inside of me but at that moment, I knew that I wanted to be in the safety of my own home because something could change and I no longer felt in control of my own body.

So we went home.

We kept busy doing odds and ends around the house. After a while, I decided I wanted to go on a walk. By this point, my contractions were a bit stronger but not anything I could call regular. It was a lovely fall day too :) The air was crisp, the leaves were gold and red. I felt at peace.

It wasn't until about 4pm that I started having regular contractions. I noticed that they had started coming 5 minutes apart. I counted the length: 35-40 seconds each. Well, thats good, I thought. I tried to ignore them as best I could, like how my midwife instructed me to. By the time we made dinner, I was no longer hungry (I don't know if this was because of how much food we had been eating all day or because the contractions were starting to HURT but...). 7pm rolled by and finally I was willing to say, "I think I'm in labor." Brandon laughs at me because of how reluctant I was to say I was in labor but the last thing I wanted was for everyone to have certain expectations of when the baby would be born and be calling or expecting us to call when in reality, nothing was happening. From 7-9pm I waited out the increasingly more painful contractions I was experiencing. We tried to watch a movie, the new Star Trek movie, bad choice. For me, watching a highly intense movie while experiencing (and trying to ignore) highly intense pain was not a good combination. I started standing, swaying my hips, trying to work with each contraction. Finally, I told Brandon we had to turn the movie off. At 9pm, Brandon decided to call our midwife.

I had been planning all along on having a waterbirth. One glitch, however, was that our baby was born 10 days early and we may or may not have been entirely ready for him. (I didn't want to be completely ready because I was afraid that having everything done would just make the indefinite amount of time I had to wait feel that much longer). Our midwife still had the birthing pool. When she finally arrived around 10 all I could think about was how much I wanted to be in the water. I have no idea how far apart my contractions were. All I know was that I barely had enough time to relax and recuperate before I was on to another. It took Brandon and our midwife 45 long minutes to set up the pool and by that time I was in transition.

I always wondered what kind of woman-in-labor I would be. You see movies of women screaming the whole time; there are other women (like my mother) who barely make any noise. Well, I discovered something about myself: I am a pretty noisy laboring woman. The only time I actually screamed was when his head came out and then a bit later when the rest of him arrived too (and those screams were more out of surprise then pain), but I sure did groan a lot the rest of the time. It helped so much!! I think this is one of the main reasons, looking back, I value my homebirth so much. I felt so free to just be what I needed to be. I felt comfortable and unjudged, surrounded only by my home and husband.

Solomon Andrew Danevicius popped out of my womb at 11:50pm Saturday October 17th after just a bit over 1 hour of pushing.

Yes, my labor was painful, but the whole time I kept expecting it to get worse. I just couldn't believe that my body was really ready for him to come out! Everything was so surreal...until suddenly I looked and saw my little son in my husband's arms. In that moment, I felt so present and at peace. I must confess that my first thought after Solomon was born was "that wasn't so bad at all!" and my second was, "my goodness, his lips are so red!" After those two thoughts, I took in everything else about my little baby in a flood. "He is so tiny!" "He is a boy!" "I can't believe he is a boy!" "Look Brandon, he is a boy!" Haha....maybe I was super happy he was a boy :)

I thank God that I had such a positive birth experience. I could not have asked for a more providential sequence of events. I did not tear, my postpartum recovery has been as good as could be hoped for, and I am blessed with a beautiful healthy child. I don't know if I reached that point which some women speak of, a point where you have to face your true self or whatever happens. I do think that my pregnancy and labor, however, composed a journey of acceptance for me. I have never felt so invaded (not in the typical negative sense) or out of control as I have felt throughout these past 9 months.

I realize that this is just the beginning of a journey that will last my entire life. I have just started to glimpse what it means in scripture that a woman shall be sanctified by childbirth and I pray for the strength, humility, and acceptance to embrace this new vocation of motherhood.

I want to blog, but I have temporarily given up that profession to become a full time nursing machine.

*sigh*

my baby is sleeping and I should be too

Well, my wee little one came down with the inevitable case of jaundice. Don't get me wrong, he is just fine. Just a bit yellow in skin and in eyes. His energy is just fine...lethargic would be the opposite word one would use to describe him! (this kid is so wiry and feisty!) But he did sleep almost the entire first two days of his life as almost all babies do and then when he would finally wake up, he couldn't figure out how to nurse and he would just get super frustrated, all of which means he did not get enough milk. So now our midwife has us on an every two hour feeding schedule—day and night. Which makes for a very tired momma. We are getting this whole nursing thing down, though, slowly but surely.

I have been reflecting a lot on the whole baby thing and being a parent and what its like when suddenly your family of two becomes a family of three and I will blog more deeply later.

For now, I just want to say that this baby is precious. So very very precious. More precious than I could ever have imagined! And I don't care if it takes a thousand days of two hour feedings, he is totally worth it! My one hope for him is that he will always know how loved he is—by God, by Brandon and I, and by all his dear family.



(suntaning on a cloudy day...)