An announcement and an apology

Okay, it’s about time that I write about what I’ll be doing next year.  But this announcement also comes with an apology.  

I am currently half way through a pregnancy and will be spending most of my time being a mother next year.  We are excited to be growing our family in this way, with a good dose of nervous thrown in too!  (This is why we won’t have as much space in our house next year.)   

The baby is due at the end of February, the 29th to be exact (though babies are rarely exact).  J is quite excited about that due date, seeing as it’s a leap year, but I’m glad that only about 4% of babies are born on their due date.  The poor child would only get a ‘real’ birthday every four years!  

My apology is this: for those of you who struggle with childlessness, I am sorry.  I am sorry for the pain that this announcement may cause you, and I am sorry for the pain you have already gone through and are going through as you seek to answer your good desire to have children, be they biological or adopted.  I don’t have any answers and there is nothing that I can say to lessen your pain.  Our desire to be sensitive to you is part of the reason why this announcement has taken so long to happen online.  We wanted to be sensitive to you and not make a big online announcement.  You are not forgotten by us.  We love you, and so does our creator God.  We long for the day that we can celebrate new life with you. 

Through family eyes

Sometimes life is busy and things happen that I’d love to update you all about, but then the next thing happens and I don’t seem to find a time to sit down and write about it.  There will (may…) be a few posts up this week about things that happened last week that I’d love to reflect on and write about.  I get frustrated writing about things late that I almost give up on writing about them at all, but there have been some great things that I’d like to write about so I’ll swallow the discomfort and write anyway. 

I went with a family of five to The Easter Show on Tuesday last week.  They have a five-seater car but were able to borrow a bigger car from one of our neighbours so that I could ride in the car with them.  The three kids seats took up the middle row of seats and the back row would normally have been accessed from this middle row.  So I climbed over the back of my seat to get in.  The kids couldn’t see me but we entertained each other by high-fives over the back of their seats and surprise tickles on their hands when they were within my reach. 

I had a lot of fun at The Show, helping keep track of the children, visiting the animals, dodging the rain (okay maybe that bit wasn’t so much fun), watching the wood chopping, keeping the children entertained (and being entertained by them), eating show food and marvelling at the food displays. 

It was nice to experience a bit of life with three children, and to help the parents, whether it was holding a little hand or pushing the pram.  I wasn’t bothered about rides or particularly adult things to do at The Show (if there are things that are particularly adult…) and it was fun to watch little faces light up as they spun around in a giant teacup.  I protected a two-year-old from the piglet in the petting pen when she decided she didn’t really want to pat it, reminded her that Hoot had to go home and we said goodbye to him already, and told an-almost-four-year-old the story of the three little pigs. 

The Show through family eyes was fun.  I found myself looking at certain things from a child’s perspective (piglets are quite large when you’re the size of a two-year-old).  But I also saw the parent perspective: constantly on the look out for the children, following her if she wandered in the other direction, and dealing with tantrums.  And it made The Show enjoyable in a different way being there with a different focus that I would at The Show back home. 

Thanks friends for letting me tag along with you and be part of your family for the day!

Postponed Thankful Thursday

Again I have been lax in writing here on my blog, and particularly in keeping up with my weekly Thankful Thursday posts.  Right now I’m just thankful that I’ve finally finished my essay (which I got an extension for because of being sick the week it was due).  This may be a short post because I am also thankful to be going to bed very soon.

This week I’m thankful for:

Help at Kid’s Club
J had to fill it at Kid’s Club last minute today because a couple of leaders were away, including the one who was due to do the talk.  With little preparation J did the talk on the relevant passage, brilliantly fielded some tricky questions from the kids about eternal life, and threw himself into the games.  I love watching him interact with children and seeing how much he enjoys it. 

Netball
On Tuesday we had our first game of netball and it was good fun.  I haven’t run like that in quite a while so even though we only played two 12 minute halves that was enough for me.  It was fun to do something as part of a team again and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to get to know the people in my team.  I’m thankful for the invitation to join the team, which came as a surprise for me. 

Baby cuddles
A friend who I studied with last year and who lives near our college community has just had a baby.  One of the wonderful ways our community supports those with newborns is to organise a meal roster.  Today it was our turn and when we dropped off the meal J and I both got to have a hold of the little 3 week old cutie.  I’m always amazed at how little babies start out. 

Now I’m off to bed.  What are you thankful for this week?

Thankful Thursday

This post is inspired by another blogger who I’ve been reading regularly.  Unfortunately I can’t link you to her blog because it seems to have moved or shut down.  But a shout out to Samara for the inspiration.

The plan is that I will write a thankful Thursday blog post each week.  I want to do this to remind myself of the things I have to be thankful for in my life, and hopefully encourage others to be thankful as well.  I don’t want this to ever turn into a space for the ‘humble brag’, so if it does sound like that to you, please pull me up on it!  I err on the side of pessimism sometimes so I want to remind myself of the things I can thank God for.  I used to have a notebook where I wrote down things to be thankful for at the end of each day, but that fizzled out a while ago.  Hopefully making this a weekly blog thing it will also keep me accountable to actually doing it.  Here it goes!

Encouragement from my husband
This week and last week I’d been feeling stressed out about getting our final assignment done for the semester.  I hadn’t left myself enough time to do it, it was making me feel guilty and worried.  J was very encouraging, reminding me about why I’m at Bible College, telling me not to worry about marks and praying with and for me. 

Kid’s Club
I have a bit of a mixed relationship with Kid’s Club.  Particularly when I have to do the talk, and that was my job last week.  I don’t like public speaking and I just wanted to stay home and work on my assignment so I didn’t really want to go to Kid’s Club.  To top it off I also left at home one of my props for the talk.  However, somehow (through God’s work I’m sure!) it all pulled together.  I thought of some different illustrations and easily-located props to use in the talk, the kids listened pretty well and were great at memorising the Bible memory verse.  “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 John 3:1).  Please pray with me that these kids would be God’s children by trusting and obeying him. 

Time to spare
Normally I finish my college assignments with minutes to spare.  This means I’m up until midnight on assignment nights, rushing to finish and get all the formatting correct before it hits 11:55pm, the deadline.  But this week I finished and submitted my assignment before dinner.  I was much more calm and had time to check my references conformed to the referencing style.  This was a welcome change and will hopefully help me to aim for this again next time. 

What are you thankful for this week?

Service on CE Camp

J and I just got back yesterday from CE-SU Kid's Camp, something we've been doing together for a number of years now and J for many years before that.  CE stands for Christian Endeavour and SU is Scripture Union.  This camp we had about 80 kids and 30 leaders away for four nights with the aim of giving the kids a genuine encounter with Jesus and encouraging and equipping them to serve him wholeheartedly.

This was one of the pictures we used this year because we had a medieval theme.
Photo from cenetwork.org.au

J was the director, a role he also had last year, and I was a pastoral carer again.  This meant that I was available as a support for four leaders, stepping in to help as they needed me, or listening if they needed to talk about something, camp related or not.  If I wasn't busy with those things I found jobs to do, such as stray dishes, set up for the canteen, sweeping and cleaning and other things.

I love this role for a number of reasons.  Firstly, I get to pastorally care for people, which is exactly what I want to do.  I'm not sure how good I am at this yet and I do doubt myself sometimes, but I love the opportunity to listen to people, to comfort and support them and hopefully be helpful to them in the process.  I also like that the role of pastoral carer is so self-directed as I enjoy the opportunity to be working on this skill.  I really value this opportunity to serve and it's this that I want to write about a bit more.

A lot of the work that I do as a pastoral carer is unseen, or seen by only a few people.  I like this 'background' kind of service, not just because I am shy and don't like being up the front, but also because it prevents me from getting proud about my work.  There's something about hidden service that makes me feel closer to God.  Because I know that I'm not acting for my own benefit but for others.

This reminds me of something that the speaker talked about on camp.  Though I'd heard this before it was a good reminder.  He said that if you put Jesus first, others second and youself third, you will have true JOY in life.  I'm still working on this, I certainly don't always get it right and it isn't always easy, but serving at CE camp this year was a reminder of the joy that it is to serve others.

When you're not a mother but there are a lot of babies

I had a few nervous days last year when I hoped and prayed that I wasn't pregnant.  Now, just a year on, I find myself thinking sometimes that it wouldn't be so bad if God gave us a little unplanned miracle.  What has changed?

We live in a community of 20 college students with their wives, five of whom don't have children.  The children in this community range in age from newborn to nine years old.  There were ten babies born this year alone.  It's easy when surrounded by all these young children, particularly the babies, to start wishing that I was a mother too.  The support that I've seen this community show to families with newborns is beautiful and admittedly very tempting to be on the receiving end of, particularly for a first child.

But I don't want to be influenced into starting a family just because I'm jealous of the mothers around me.  I do want to be a mother one day, but I don't think we should try to become parents just yet.  Just because most of the people living around me in our community have children doesn't mean that I should have children now too.  In fact that's a pretty selfish motivation to create a new life.

I recognise that my wistful desire to have children now is selfish.  Sometimes I think it would be a great way of getting out of the hard things to come next year and beyond.  If I had a child now I wouldn't have to have a career, and that's okay with me.

J and I have been married for nearly a year and a half now.  I know people who have had children earlier than that in their marriage, but I want more time as just the two of us.  I don't want to add to our family just yet.  Because babies change things.  Once you're a parent you can't ever go back to the life you had before children.  And it would be unfair to J to have a child now for the wrong reasons because it absolutely would affect his study.  This isn't something that would affect only myself.  

Without the right motivation (or God's influence), having a child now is selfish.  For now I know I will enjoy living in this community of many children, playing with them, baby-sitting them, and learning about parenting from their parents.  As a non-parent I know that I don't see all the sides of parenting.  I don't have to clean up vomit, change dirty nappies or discipline a stubborn child.  I am glad that when the baby start crying I can hand him back to his mother!