Baby pic again!

Okay, here you can see his little head and his little hands, which he was moving all around. He actually turned toward us and I was hating that this wasn't the 3D scan, but no big deal: we'll see him for real in just a few weeks. I'm officially 8 weeks from my due date... oh my gosh. That's huge.

I'm off to bed for now, but I've been thinking on some things lately that I want to jot down. I'll be back in the next couple of days to do that.

Until then, let this bit of freshman wisdom tide you over: Did you know that Indians (Native Americans) did not bathe because they were afraid of water? Yes, according to my girl Ericka, that's the "God's honest truth."

One of my boys advised me to put that down on my list of dumb things freshmen say. Done, Hunter :)

Baby face :)

Can you see him? It's kind of hard to see, but-- and you know me, so you know that this had to be a relief from something, though you might not know what-- i'm happy to report that it looks like my child has a normal little face.

See, they keep trying to get him to pose for a profile shot. Even though he is not born yet, I'm getting to know something about little buddy here: he is not easily manipulated. He keeps his head facing my spine whenever someone wants to take his picture...no 3D pics for us because he was asleep and wouldn't wake up when they tried to take it...and woke up about a mile down the road and danced and played for the next hour after i left the place :)

But there was this one picture... i learned a new word yesterday when they took this shot. "artifact." At one point, it looked like his skull had this crazy crack across it. the ultrasound tech is just moving along, chatting with us and pointing stufff out, but you know me-- i'm thinking "OH MY GOSH!! do you see the CRACK across his head?????" when i asked her about it she told me that it was an artifact; just some shadow or stray mark in the image. anyway, there was a picture back when they were first trying to get his profile, around week 20, maybe, and it scared me.... he looked like cro-magnon baby. he had all of these crazy sharp lines for his nose and upper and bottom lip, and his head seemed gigantic. the technician was cooing over it ("looook at your precious wittle boy") and i'm thinking, "i will love him no matter what, but Lord help him!!"

but this week, in this picture, i see from his face that he has a little squished up nose (and have been counseled by a few that he won't even look like this when he's born-- everything's distorted in the amniotic fluid) and two eyes and things don't look angular at all. sigh. he's okay.

bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. ALLLLL that is within me :)

Update: Orange Cannister Blues

Brief update: all is well! All of my labs came back normal, my blood pressure is fine, and my glucose screening came back normal!! Yay!!

Meanwhile, baby boy is kicking so much every day... what a blessing. This was a fantastic week.

So, off to bed. Next week is BREAK!! Time to start on the nursery!! I'm 27 weeks this week-- third trimester begins on Sunday! Can't believe how time has flown by... wow. It's like a dream...

It's all good

On TLC right now, they're showing one of the "Night of Medical Mysteries" and I can't help but watch. Typically, I'm on restriction from these shows-- pregnancy related or not-- but tonight I figured it was fairly safe. I saw this one before I got pregnant so I know that none of the "mysteries" on this particular show really have anything to do with where I am now. One has to do with a woman who carried an ectopic pregnancy through to late second term and gave birth to a healthy baby growing in her stomach cavity. Her odds were 1 in 60 million that she would die. She lived and so did the baby. The second story has to do with a woman who was pregnant with TWINS and did not know until she went to the hospital thinking she was DYING and instead gave birth (I don't know what it is about that one-- it makes me kind of laugh every time...). The final one was about a woman from India who miscarried but never delivered the baby because she was horrified at what she saw happening to women in the hospital there. At 70-something, she went through a surgery to have the baby removed and it was completely calcified. A "stone baby" they called it.

Wow.

These stories put my pregnancy into perspective. Briefly, I'm sure, but still. I went to the doctor last week and my blood pressure had shot through the roof-- my blood pressure has never been high in my life so it freaked me out some. Which probably relates to why it didn't come down that fast. A friend of mine called it "white coat syndrome": my heart starts to race when I know I'm going to be at the doctor's office and that I'm going to have my blood pressure taken. I always have to have it taken twice at a visit and the nurses in that office know it by now (they are fantastic nurses). But this time when they came to take it again, it remained high. It had come down quite a bit but was still many points higher than it normally is. They decided to put me on blood pressure medicine and to have me do a 24 hour urine test. Great. I didn't want to take medicine and UGH, a 24 hour urine test???

All of this on the same morning that I was doing the glucose screening test and an ultrasound.

I want to stay low-maintenance, at least at the doctor's office. I am just fine being high maintenance at home (sorry honey)-- Don has the most beautiful servant's heart and he has taken such good care of me in spite of the horribly messy house and my mood swings (which, according to him, are not so bad)-- but I don't want to be high maintenance anywhere else. I don't want to be on medicine and I don't want to be scheduled for a C-section and I don't want to have to be monitored closely.

But now I have to go see the specialist on Thursday after school and I have to take my pee to the doctor's office during my planning period and I'm still waiting to see if I have to take the second, ickier gestational diabetes test (please don't have it, please don't have it-- my mantra) which involves blood-sucking every three hours and I CAN'T miss more school! And then, of course, a dear friend suggested the possibility of being put on bed rest, which is not a restful idea to me....

Meanwhile, collecting urine at this stage is like performing acrobatic routines on par with Cirque du Soleil. It's kind of funny in a really embarrassing kind of way. I'm completely grossed out, collecting my urine. My friend Paige is totally unimpressed-- she likes to describe puss balls she finds during surgery that are "the size of your fist," in addition to telling us about puss balls that shoot across the room when perforated. Nice. I have nothing so glamorous. Anyway. So tomorrow, my pee will be in the back of my car on ice until my planning period in the afternoon. It makes me feel like I'll have a dirty little secret... I should put some juice drinks in the cooler alongside the orange container, labeled "Swaney Urine," and send one of my kids out to the car to get one for me! OH NO!!! That would be horrible!!! Trust me-- I won't do it. But I'll think about it.

Anyway, I'm trusting the Lord that this will be a week of good news-- or at least, peace if there's not so happy news. If I do happen to have gestational diabetes (I have no symptoms, but you can't ever tell), I will trust the Lord that He has me well in hand. I will trust that my little baby boy will turn around during the ultrasound on Tuesday and let us see his face (we're doing 3D!). I will trust that all my numbers for whatever tests I have to have on Thursday afternoon will come back normal. But again, I will trust that, if they aren't, the Lord has me.

Because when you think about it, this baby isn't in my stomach cavity (even though he's squishing it up there!), he isn't undiagnosed (um, didn't she feeeel those babies kicking???), and he isn't calcified. I'm breathing, I'm happy, I feel great, I'm not growing hair on my back or the tops of my feet. So I figure, dang. I'm cool.


Philippians 4:8

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.

Grateful

I tend to exaggerate, but I am telling you now that the following statement is no exaggeration:

I was almost killed in a car accident today.

On the way to work, I pulled out of our street onto a road that people (including ME) tend to fly down. Before I pulled out, I looked right, then left, and then I ignored the wise words of Jiminy Crickett and did not look right again.

The next thing that happened was really weird.

I stayed in the left hand lane. I mean, normally when you turn left you turn into the right lane, right? But I stayed in the left hand lane-- everything was so strange. There was no traffic coming from that direction, fortunately. I sort of turned to look behind me (why??)before I corrected my car into the right hand lane and at that moment (literally 2 seconds after I had turned onto this road) a champagne colored Suburban came flying past me, going way too fast, but also in its lane....

How did I not see that thing? I pulled right out into it. If I had not somehow stayed in the wrong lane for 2 seconds I would have at the very least totalled both of our cars, and I should say again, the Suburban was going FAST. I drive a pretty average sized car but would have been toast. And it would have been my own fault. Unless I simply didn't see him because he was driving way too fast and came up on me too soon.... I don't know.

But all day I've had flashes of how close I came, and how miraculously my life was saved. I can only imagine some supernatural force holding my car in the wrong lane (this is the same exact spot Don wrecked his truck this summer and busted up his birthday kayak) for the seconds I needed to be there. But I started praising the Lord right there and have just been thinking about this baby and the fact that the Lord saved HIM for sure-- a wreck could have been so bad for him, even if I wasn't crazy hurt...though I just don't see how I could have been anything less than badly hurt.

Wow. Thank you Jesus.

And the other thing is this-- and I know it sounds trite and cliche-- but I wonder...who do people thank if they don't have Him? Do they thank the heavens? Do they thank goodness? Man, I needed to thank someone today... I had to thank HIM.

Baby, baby

This is literally the most amazing experience of my entire life.

I should amend this statement. I do, in the words of my friend Caroline, tend to "speak in superlatives." Because to say that being pregnant is the most amazing experience of my life isn't exactly true. Falling in love with Don and experiencing that love reciprocated in strength and depth was almost crippling in its intensity. Going away with him after our wedding was such a paradigm shift -- it was awe inspiring. I remember standing at a train station in Stockholm, hands shoved deep into my pockets in the -40 weather, waiting to spend the day walking through that lovely old city on our honeymoon. He had walked back into the little building at the station to get a map and I watched him as he walked toward me while reading the train schedule and it occurred to me how deeply happy I was.... All of those years of traveling alone-- wonderful years, filled with the presence of the Lord and fantastic adventures with great friends, but still-- I had always quietly prayed for a husband. For someone who was better at reading train schedules than I was. Someone with a sense of direction. Someone to help carry my stuff-- luckily for Don, I had prayed for a long time so in the meantime had figured out how to pack light and how to survive in a foreign city so I wasn't too needy :).

Anyway, I had never experienced love like that-- friendship like that. Like what we had and still have and have even better today than it was then. That's truly amazing. To be loved the way Christ loves the church....

But this is different. And I know that I don't know the half of it because right now, this little one is hidden away and I only have the sensation of his flips and bumps a few times a day (thank God for godly women who assure me that they, too, worried that their baby wasn't kicking enough...he's still little and sleeps 12-14 hrs a day. I need to CHILL). But where I was amazed at the way I was and am LOVED by Don and the depth of feeling that I had and have for him, this time...well, with this love it's completely just focused on this little person whether he loves me back or not and I remember that oh my goodness...he is my child. And I love him. And I've never even seen him. My son. My own. Ours, but right now... mine alone to feel...

Yesterday I spent the better part of the day with one of my best friends from high school who has remained like family to me and has added his wife to that mix. We sat in his parents' kitchen and talked about... well, everything, all day long, and at the end of the day I asked them to pray for the baby and me and Don. We stood outside as they prepared to go minister in North Carolina and they laid hands on me and prayed and all I could think as they were praying was, "Oh God, I forgot how much you love me! I forgot that you have words for me, that you have dreams for me-- that in the same way that I deeply hope that my son will be whole and healthy and happy and that he will follow You and listen for your voice and will feel how deeply he is loved and wanted by his parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles, both by birth and friendship, You want the same things for me!"

Suddenly, the idea of the Holy Spirit manifesting in groans and utterances makes even more sense to me... many times during this pregnancy I have been reduced to tears while praying, just silently feeling what I wanted to say to the Lord. Sometimes there just aren't words for the depth of desire I feel for good things for him.

And I've never even held him.

It's amazing, but here's this, too: what a great life, filled with so many amazing things that we have to categorize them :)