Sleep Deprivation

:-) Being a mom is the most life changing, amazing thing I have ever done! Plus, Jason and I got very lucky and we have the perfect baby who only wakes up once at night! That being said however, we are still suffering from a little sleep deprivation. Here are just a few things that have occurred, most likely due to sleep deprivation!
1) One afternoon when it was just Harper and I home for lunch, I poured myself a glass of sweet tea...and then another. I'm not sure if I forgot I had just poured one or if I thought Jason was home. I drank both, I figured I needed the extra caffeine.
2) I was making beef stew. I dumped the entire package of beef into the pot, absorbent liner and all! I have a sweet husband, who scrubbed the burned pad off of the pot!
3) I put the milk in the pantry and the cereal box in the refrigerator. Fortunately, I figured this out right after I did it! (Have you noticed a lot of these involve food? Maybe I should be wary of cooking!)
4) I have called Harper the dog's name...maybe I shouldn't admit this, but it is true. I don't think she is scarred too badly.
5) I have put Harper's diapers on inside out and backwards...most of these have occurred at 2 am, but not all!
6) I have walked into a room and forgot why I was there (oh wait, I did that before I had her, too!)

I am sure there will be many more to come! I wouldn't trade a single second of sleep for this precious girl!

Two weeks old!!!

I can't believe Harper is two weeks old! It is strange because on one hand, I can't believe it has been two weeks already, and on the other hand, I can't remember life without Harper so it seems like she has always been here! Here are pictures of her at birth, at one week, and at two weeks!

Our beautiful blessing!

On September 24, 2010 Jason and I had our world changed forever! Harper Grace Martin was born at 4:40pm. She weighed 7 lbs, 2 ounces and was 21 inches long! There are no words that can ever express how MUCH love you have immediately for your child. Learning that you are going to have a child you know you love this being that you haven't even met, but seeing her and hearing her for the first time was AMAZING. I wish I could put into words exactly how I felt. We are so grateful and thankful for our sweet daughter and we praise God that He has chosen us to be her parents! I think the best way to sum up our feelings on becoming parents is to quote the last Psalm, Psalm 150.
"Praise the Lord.
Praise God in his sanctuary;
Praise him in his mighty heavens.
Praise him for his acts of power;
praise him for his surpassing greatness.
Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet,
praise him with tambourine and dancing,
praise him with the strings and flute,
praise him with the clash of cymbals,
praise him with resounding cymbals.
let everything that has breath praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord." Psalm 150
We feel like shouting from the rooftops our joy and our praises to God! Enjoy these precious pictures of sweet Harper!

Thoughts on our long awaited arrival!

Don't worry- no one is here yet! I have just been asked about a million times "are you ready". Maybe now I'll direct them to our poor neglected blog. My answer? Honestly? No. Of course not. I think Jason would say the same thing. We have been blessed with amazing friends and family who have given us many of the things we need for our sweet girl, we have taken childbirth/parenting classes that have mentally prepared (and possibly scarred) us for what to expect prior/during/after her arrival, and we have been praying that we are spiritually ready. BUT (isn't there always a but?) we have no hospital bags packed, no place for her her to sleep when she first comes home (not put together anyway), not enough diapers, and no car seat installed. Don't panic. It will get done. But even if we had been ready for months, my answer to the "are you ready?" question would still be no. How would I even begin to fathom if I am ready or not? And somehow, I am okay with that. Which might be the bigger lesson. Me, who is so planned, so future thinking, so OCD about deadlines (yes, I was the student that had her papers written prior to the night before) is okay with not being ready. I am already learning that God uses parenthood to teach you to lean on HIM. I have a feeling that many, many times over the next (fill in the #) years Jason and I will be at a total loss and have nothing but God to cling to. In fact, I know it. He promises it. And its okay. For too long I have clung to myself and my plans and my plans have not always happened, but you know what did happen? God's plans for my life, the plans he's had forever for me, have always happened. And my life has been so much more blessed (not in a "I'm rich and successful" way, but in a 'I now know my God more deeply and can praise Him through storms and celebrations' way). My prayer for anyone reading this is that sometime in your life when (not if) you are left with nothing but the Lord to cling to that you will do just that, cling to him. Let him fill you to the measure until you are overflowing. He'd love to do that. He longs to do that.

4:00 am

I have a feeling I will see this time on the clock a lot more in the coming weeks. 4:00 am really doesn't bother me TOO much, though, since I usually wake up at 5:00am anyway. What really bothered me was that I actually woke up in the 3's...I am the kind of person that needs her 8 hours every night. However, I am pretty sure over the past year plus, and especially the past several months God has been slowly preparing me for parenthood and what little amount of sleep comes with it. Job in another state in Eastern time zone? check! Leaving the house before 6am every day? check! Being pregnant and not being able to go back to sleep? check! I don't say any of this to complain. Sometimes I actually appreciate the time. I have always been a morning person, so I'd much rather wake too early than have trouble falling asleep. When I was little I would wake up pretty early every morning and I loved it because even on school days I would have time to drink my hot chocolate (precursor to hot tea) and play before I had to get ready for school. In the summers when we'd go visit my grandparents I remember walking down the road from our house to theirs in the dark and I'd sit with my grandmother and we'd watch the sunrise through her big picture window. It is comforting to know that another day is here. Another chance to redeem yourself at life! Maybe it is the farmer genes in my blood. Maybe its the baby hormones. Maybe I am just a touch crazy. I don't mind 4:00 am. We'll see if I will be singing another tune after our sweet little sleep stealer comes!

Put Up or Shut Up

So these are just my thoughts, not necessarily backed up by references but pretty much just pure emotion of the moment I'm in right now. I just feel like I need to get this out.

If I had a collective hand to slap the American public with, I would do so right now. After said slap I would get in their face and tell them to wake up and act like adults. Seriously people! What is up with this fatalistic view of reality we have come to develop in the last few years?! I don't know if it's because of the recession or the war or what it is but it has got to stop. This oil spill is just the icing on top of the cake, I guess. I hear more people bemoaning the end of the world because of this thing than I think I've ever heard.

Do we just lack perspective? Is that the problem? Are we all just so bad at history that we're unable to look at anything beyond the time frame of right now, this second? I think that might be the case but surely some of us are able to take the collective experiences & education of our lives and develop a rational thought about the situation. The Gulf of Mexico (GOM in interweb slang) is a big place. A HUGE place. It's no Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, but it's pretty doggone massive. The oil spill is big. It's huge. It's currently out of control. However, the GOM has seen something like this before. In the 70's. IXTOC I. Look it up. I suggest Wikipedia, though I'm sure there are better sites out there also. IXTOC I was bad. Real bad. It took a LONG time to stop. The Mexican government didn't pay many claims related to the spill. They didn't do near what BP is doing and is going to do to clean it up. However, the GOM survived. She recovered. She didn't die. In fact, I'll propose a really novel thought. We can't kill her! (Yes, she's a girl, same as a ship is a girl. Cause I said so.) How arrogant as human beings do we have to be to believe that we can possibly destroy a part of God's creation as big as the GOM?! Do we even understand what we are saying in a statement like that? (More on my thoughts on the environmental side of this later, if I have time)

I refuse to let this ruin my life, same as I refuse to let the recession dominate my thought processes. After a certain point, this will only be as bad as we make it in our reality. What I mean is, the economical & ecological effects of this will be, for the most part, measurable in terms of losses & costs. However, the emotional effects of this will be exactly what we make them. We're at a crossroads with this thing. We can choose to let it kill us or we can choose to use it to make us stronger and teach us a lesson. I personally choose the latter. I think the jury is still out on most people, but I'd say the vast majority will choose to sit at home and just cry about it, hoping somebody else fixes it so they don't have to feel guilty about buying gas from BP anymore. Let's face it, most people won't actually DO anything about it. It's the same as any other disaster. They'll sit at home, be angry, and hope somebody else fixes it so they don't have to get their hands dirty. Well America, now's another opportunity to get up off your lazy butt, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and be great. It's been a long time since we've been challenged to do that. For far too long now we've had leaders that have told us to just stay at home, they'll fix the problem, they'll make you comfortable. Well America, now you see where that has gotten you. You have a President who is so far detached from the situation that all he can do is give speeches about it saying the same thing over and over again. You have a regulatory agency that is so mired in red tape that they can't actually regulate anything. You have an oil company that's so pressured to produce products that they cut corners on safety so that you can live comfortably at home. So America, what's it gonna be? Put up or shut up? It's up to you, because like it or not, where we go from here is on our shoulders, not BP's. They just have to pay for it.

My apologies if that read a bit like a James Joyce novel. It was purely what came out of my head at the moment I typed it. I'm just tired of all the whining and crying. I'm about to have a baby girl. She'll give me all of that I need. I don't need to hear it from adults too.

A Life Beginning

Jason and I were talking about all the amazing things Baby Girl Baby has already gotten to do and I thought it would be fun to keep a record of these things to share with her one day. Since she has been hanging around waiting to arrive, BGB has gotten to:

1) Hear some pretty amazing music; she has attended a Roger Daltrey concert (of the Who), an Eric Clapton concert, a Toby Mac concert, and has gotten to worship with us at church every Sunday to some amazing music!

2) She has gotten to go to Dallas, Savannah, Providence RI (at the end of the month), Atlanta, Birmingham, Ft. Walton Beach FL, Columbus GA, Skipperville AL, Wetumpka, and of course Auburn!

3) She has been fishing, on a boat ride, running with her "brother" (Toby), 'played' in the snow, and flown on an airplane.

Oh the places you'll go Baby Girl...we can't wait to show you all this life has in store!