The waiting starts.

As soon as you fall pregnant, you know that there's a time limit on it. One day, before you see this same month again next year, you will hold another child in your arms. And it's inevitable to always be looking ahead.

Sometimes I wish for the impossible- that there is nobody else in the world who is pregnant at the same time as me.

Sure, there's heaps of comfort in grieving together at the loss of your pre-baby body and all the ailments that come with a body used to working for one start to work for two that we can all share, but there's several frustrations about it for me.

Firstly, the company gained in this life-bearing process also means that the comparisons can begin "Oh, you're so small in comparison to..." (insert name here of someone who's baby is gestationally 3 months older than yours- or worse, someone who is due after you), or even "Sarah's baby was 3 kgs at birth, and yours was 4. It must be because of all those hot chips you ate in the early months" (That one can be attributed to my gorgeous mother, who forgets that she already made this same comment last week.) 

 

Of the frustrations of sharing a pregnancy with close friends, here is the hardest part for me. And a warning to readers- this is a string of highly selfish thoughts I'm about to unleash for you, but which at the moment, I seem unable to control.

Several of my close friends have been blessed by God and given children around the same time as me. But with a distinct difference- the three of us have now travelled through 2 pregnancies together, and with each time, I'm the last one still waiting.

Hayley gave birth to her beautiful second daughter, Zara, yesterday. And I am totally over the moon about this new life God has created. I'm happy for the birth and it brings me heaps of joy to hear about it and I'm sincerely delighted for my gorgeous friend, who has gone through her painful 40 week waiting period herself. Unfortunately, my excitement is also intertwined with a niggling thought "I'm still 10 weeks away."

These 10 weeks weren't that long until yesterday. I could have been pregnant for another 20 weeks and have been happy enough to do it. Now they seem like an eternity away.

What's weird about this is that I love being pregnant. I haven't had severe back pain like my friend, Hayley. I'm still coping well in this pregnancy, even with the 3 weeks of over 33 degree days out here and still carrying small, which helps me lug myself up our stairs at home to the 43 degree rooms upstairs. This new little life isn't ready to be born yet. I'm not yet organised anyway, and still this niggling in my brain has started.

My second friend, Sarah, is due in another 5 weeks for her daughter. Again, I'm sure the distance between March 9 and April 11 will be more than a little frustrating for me. When she was due for the first time with her boy, she was 4 months ahead, which was enough for me to settle down into a "my-baby-won't-survive-if-it's-born-now. It's-good-to-be-waiting." mentality. But only 5 weeks ahead is close enough to stay wishful for an early birth. Especially if this heat doesn't let up and even more pressing, if Avalon gets sick again and requires middle of the night stand up cuddles. I must say though that after having a 41 wk and 1 day pregnancy with Avalon, an early birth isn't really a forseeable probability.

The moral of the story is that I'm going to spend the next 10 weeks praying about being as content as possible. For contentment is of great gain! And even if in the next pregnancies ahead I draw the short straw and have to be the one to wait, hopefully the strength God gives me now will naturally flow over to them, too.

Poo frustrations

I woke up this morning to the unmistakable smell of poo.

My subconscious decided to tag out and let my consciousness deal with this one. Which was a real shame. Waking at 6.30 when your child happily sleeps till 8 is almost torture. I think worse than if said child actually woke you up herself.

So I stumbled into the offending room to see that I hadn't been mistaken, or disappointed by my acute sense of smell. 

Avalon was still sound asleep, but once again, her nappy couldn't cope with the volume of excrement which came out during the early hours of the morning, and as such, her hair, hands, legs were covered in chunky pieces of digested food.

I stood there, gagging and contemplating my options;

1. Go back to bed and delay the clean-up for another couple of hours.

(This wouldn't have worked, I knew I would be too disgusted to even get my mind in the space for sleep, so it quickly became an un-option.)

2.  Busy myself for another few hours and try to enjoy my early morning child-free.

3. Wake her up and bath her and just get it all over with.

Option 3 won. After all, I should treat my child the way that I would expect to be treated. If, unknowingly, I was sleeping in a pile of my own poo, I would hope that someone would wake me and clean me up. I couldn't do anything less than that for her.

So I woke my groggy girl, and held her at arms length while briskly walking to the bathroom. And after removing the saturated nappy, I plonked her into a warm bath. Good morning, gorgeous girl! 

I apologised to her the whole time and explained that she was smelly and needed a bath. I was thankful that despite her sensitive nature, I didn't have to contend with the mess and her screaming. She actually seemed to enjoy the wake-up call and splashed happily while I used a washer and copious amounts of body was to rid her of the offensive odour.

The bath took me 15 minutes until I was satisfied. The poor baby was pretty pink from scrubbing when I removed her to dry her off.

The irony doesn't escape me- I am almost obsessive-compulsive when it comes to dirt, and here I am, cleaning up child number one for the millionth time of these types of incidents, and I want 5 more of these? I must be out of my mind! 

I'm hoping the next 5 don't have digestive systems that only seem to function at night.

Please, no noise!

I never took offense to people with noisy cars before I had children. 

They were certainly unimpressive. Flaunting their powerful engines as they took off down the street. But now I get so incensed by our neighbours revving their engines in the driveway during baby sleep times that I feel myself get hot. That's a frightening level of anger. Especially towards someone who has no idea that there is a baby in the house near them. 

They don't realise (and neither did I until Avy arrived) that kids are quite sensitive sleepers. If they wake up and it's too hot to get back to sleep/ too noisy/ they're hungry/ they see an interesting toy, then that's it for the day. You can be assured that the remainder of the day is filled with a tired Mum (from little rest) and a grumpy child whose body begs for sleep, but who won't go back, no matter how much patting, milk bottles or shushing you do. This often leads to injury from tired little legs plodding around the house in an uncoordinated way, several tantrums from Mum saying 'no' to things they know they're not allowed to do and a general misery fills the house for the next 5 hours.

Then another attempted sleep time starts and this tired child is now over-tired and will not go to sleep unless you cuddle their heaving, wretching and shaking from sobs body almost to sleep. (This is not something I practice normally and am not keen to start accustoming myself to being 5 months pregnant.) A tired Mum, a tired baby and a very drawn out sleeptime leaves the whole house in a shambles for the rest of the night. Once she's finally asleep at 8.30, there's no way I have energy to do much healthy cooking or any cleaning to prepare myself for the following day.

These boys have no idea how their lives have collided with mine. I've never spoken a word to them in my life, but their actions have caused me suffering. And they'll probably never know it.

It makes me wonder whose lives I've impacted on negatively without ever having met them. If you're reading this and you think I might be that person- I'm sorry!

Why no boy angels?

It has recently come to my attention that the only angels we have heard about in the bible are boys/men. Well, who knows if they have the attributes of an earthly man (assuming not) but they have been given man names; Gabriel and Michael.

In light of this I pose that we rethink our church christmas nativity scenes. Girls are usually the ones to dress as angels and of  course, the role of Mary. The boys traditionally go for shepherds and wise men and Joseph. 

I'd be pretty happy if next year I saw even one boy dress as an angel with the head tinsel get-up. I think it would add some more realism to our Christmas events. Sure, the role of Mary may become even more coveted a role, seeing as how she'd be the only female role left, but what the hey? Girls would totally own the role of livestock.

Cotton-balled-self-esteem-Christianity.

So I guess the lack of posts on this site shows you that I am either uninspired or have had relatively few thoughts. Both of these have some truth as pregnancy seriously diminishes my brain power daily.

But mainly, it's just because when I think of writing something, I notice that those interesting thoughts have left me throughout the day. All that's there when I sit down here to type is a list of unfinished jobs around the house and the thought of what to cook for the evening.

But here's one for you.

(Aside- I probably haven't explained my view on this at all well. So I apologise for my crude thought process.) 

Several Christians have said recently comments along the lines of "Just because someone doesn't want to hear what you have to say about Jesus doesn't mean they're rejecting you. Don't feel bad about it. They're just rejecting God." 

Lunacy, I tell you! I think these phrases have been passed around a little too liberally in our Christian circles, given that they are absolute rubbish. 

We try to make ourselves feel better about being rejected by friends or colleagues by offloading their rejection so that Christ is separate from us. But if we are in Christ, we are united with Christ. 'I no longer live, but Christ lives in me' (Gal. 2:20) 

This is the only way I am saved from my sin. I am in Christ and he has suffered for my sin.  Me and Christ are together now. No longer separable. This is how salvation works. We are NOT Christ, but we are so linked with him when we accept him into our hearts, that the bible talks as us as being united with him. 'God made him, (Jesus) who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that IN HIM we might become the righteousness of God.' (2 Cor 5:21)

We are also united with Jesus in his resurrection. Christ is raised on high, and I am raised with him. "When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear WITH HIM in glory" (Col 3:4) 

I want to love this rejection from man! This is part of our fellowship with Christ, we shouldn't distance our participation in it or take us out of the equation! Paul explains in Philippians 3:10 'I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.' 

Moreover, part of Christ's suffering's was his rejection from man ' He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering' (Isaiah 53:3)

And Jesus explains clearly how we are to take this rejection from man. 

Jesus instructed seventy two of his followers to go into the towns before him, proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is near. He directs their thoughts to the outcome of those words "He who listens to you, listens to me; he who rejects you rejects me". 

Nowhere in this great speech does he say, "but don't worry, if they reject me, they aren't rejecting you. Don't take this personally or let this little growth opportunity damage your self-esteem, ok?" That sounds to me like our cotton-balled Westernised culture coming through, rather than the reality of the situation.

The thought of people rejecting Christ, but not myself who is preaching Christ, is an entire fabrication and quite offensive to God. They cannot reject Christ without rejecting ME. We can't be torn apart like that, and why would you want to do it anyway? This kind of talk reminds me of what Peter, a friend of Jesus, spouted at Jesus' capture. He tried to distance himself from his friendship with Christ in the same way that we do today to prevent the same rejection of man. 'A servant girl saw (Peter) seated there in the firelight. She looked closely at him and said "This man was with him." But (Peter) denied it. "Woman, I don't know him." '

If only our response was the same as Peter's when he realised his insult to God. Because Peter "went outside and wept bitterly." (Luke 22:62) We sometimes look at examples such as Peter in the bible and we think "Man, that guys loser. Jesus, our Lord was right there with him, and he still rejected him. What an idiot!" But this man didn't have Jesus living inside him. The spirit had not been poured out. How much more should we be ashamed of ourselves when we think or say stuff like this, with God's spirit living IN US. We should be ashamed and weep bitterly over our sin. And as we do, bring it before the Lord of all so he can carry our burdens and relieve us of our suffering. 

What an excellent God lives in us!

Sin starts early

I've been convinced over my life that sin is found in us from birth. We enter into sin and it becomes one with our thoughts and hearts.

So I'm not ultra surprised when I see Avalon's impatience break out. Now that her mind is developing sounds to communicate these thoughts, Craig and I have been bombarded with many angry grunts a day. Grunts when she's sick of waiting for her food (it takes all of 15 seconds, but 15 seconds too long), grunts when we say "no" and close a poisons cabinet that she's just opened (we're working on building up her immunity to pestisides and cleaning products), grunts about anything she finds dissatisfying. Really, angry grunt about many things she dislikes in the day, the regular one being nappy change time.

It's good to see this, I think, because as we get older, we get cleverer about hiding our sin. Clever thoughts may try to persuade you- "I wouldn't say that I'm evil,  I'd be happier with you saying that parts of me are evil, or that parts of me are swayed by evil, but I'm not evil from my own volition. Evil is something that's done to me, that corrupts the good in me. After all, God made me in his image. So deep down, I must be good." And as soon as you've finished the thought, you hear it as if someone's said it to you. And then you realise how stupidly sinful you are. 

We can't even think properly, we're so sinful. I'm sure most  (if not all) of my thoughts are incorrect, or if not incorrect, then definitely driven by evil motives. The more I see sin, the more I see that Jesus was the only way to free us. 

As a younger Christian, I thought God may have overshot the sacrifice. Surely enough spotless goats would do it. Or maybe if we gave him grainfed beef. But, no. God sacrificing himself makes more and more sense each living day as the effects of evil permeating our very essences is made clearer to me.

Another life

I'm totally thrilled about being pregnant again. As alien-like as it sounds, i enjoy the sensation of this little human squirm around inside of me. But pregnancy is also such a scary time. It reminds me of my limitations. I can't walk very fast without gasping for breath. I can't feel safe to protect myself and Avalon when we're faced with any type of threat. Because my fitness and stamina are so limited.

Ultimately, I think pregnancy makes me a more conservative person. Someone who won't take that chance to go out for the stroll alone at dawn on Saturday morning like I used to in Newtown to get to work at the bakery. Someone who is constantly assessing her surroundings and bypassing the smoking group of teenagers instead of walking past, just in case. It's scary being this scared. Because it's not a decision, it's innate. As though something primal reminds me continually of the life I bear and the other life that can't defend itself that sits up happily in the stroller. The protective thoughts that go through my head now I'm a mother are so foreign to how I would behave before.

A year and a half ago, I would feel confident that I could take on anything and anyone, and come out pretty unscathed. I was a resourceful and independent woman, quite capable of protecting herself from at least one nasty person on the streets. But now, the thought of being attacked with a baby in the belly and a child on one hip, sends me chills. 

I wonder if once my child nurturing years are behind me, I will once again return to the person I formally knew. My guess is that now I've experienced being someone's entire world, that responsibility will continue to shape my behaviour, even after the kids have families of their own. You always hear that motherhood will change your life. I never heard that motherhood would change your personality.