reflections.

my thoughts these days seem so random and jumbled. usually i can process several things at once without feeling overwhelmed, but these days that is not the case. it seems like all of my thoughts got thrown into a blender on high speed. i’m blaming it on the pregnancy hormones. we are heading into week 35. usually the new year brings deep reflections of the previous year and goals and excitement for the year to come. this year that isn’t the case. sad to say it seems to just be merging into last year…. i guess usually i anticipate the holidays so much and new years is the pinnacle of it all… not so much this year. the one date set in my head is February 14th. I’m counting down the days and weeks until my baby girl gets here. I honestly don’t feel overwhelmed about it at all, i’m just excited for her to actually be here. I’m also looking forward to relief from pregnancy. I’m just tired at this point…. I’m running out of clothes that fit and I’m missing being able to breathe and sleep on my tummy (or sleep at all around this point). Up until this point I really did enjoy the process of pregnancy, feeling her little kicks and punches… the reality that life was growing inside of me… now her kicks and punches are not so “little” but more vicious. Its so crazy all that goes into creating life. What a journey it has has been. As long as I can remember I’ve always wanted to be a mom. From carrying around my cabbage patch dolls when I was little to carrying around little brothers and sisters, cousins and friends… I always had the desire to nurture and care for one of my own. I was more excited than I could say when I married my best friend. I knew he would not only be an amazing husband but an amazing father as well. We knew that we wanted kids, but we didn’t want them right away. We said we would wait two years before we would have them…  well, life happens. After lots of prayer and intense discussion and evaluation in our life we decided to stop “preventing”. That was in November of 2008.  We talked as though it would happen right away, like we would come home with a baby tomorrow. Month one went by with no results. It was hard to take at first, I wanted immediate results. I thought I had it all figured out. Friends all around me started having babies and getting pregnant. I went through month after month of anxiety of “not knowing” and then facing the disappointment that I wasn’t pregnant time and time again. I finally surrendered to God. I realized He is the giver of life… He has ordained the perfect time for our little one to make their grand entrance into our lives. I still had the anxiety of wondering if this could be “the month”. I went through countless tests, each one showing up with the dreaded “not pregnant.” Add to the raging PMS hormones the disappointment and I was an emotional mess. The problem was it was more than one week of the month I was like that. I have always had problems trying to lose weight as well. I had been tested for thyroid issues before, but only for Hypothyroidism. After going on month 6 of trying to get pregnant I decided to go to the doctor and have them run several different tests regarding hormone imbalances and thyroid problems. It turns out I did have Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis (an autoimmune disease in which the thyroid gland is gradually destroyed by a variety of cell and antibody mediated immune processes). They put me on some synthetic thyroid hormones and literally less than 3 weeks later I got pregnant. I didn’t find out for another few weeks that I was actually pregnant. It was so surreal. This whole process has been crazy. For so long I imagined what life would be like when I was pregnant… now my day dreams are filled with what life will be like with a little one. 5 weeks to go…. I can’t wait.

Now that i’ve experienced pregnancy in the natural i can so easily relate it to the pregnancy analogy used so often in the spiritual. I really feel like Chris and I have been not only preparing for the birth of Payton… but also preparing for the birth of a new season in our lives. 2009 was a crazy year. We learned so much about ourselves as individuals and as a couple. It was a year of growth. In March we started the process of building our first home. It was exciting at first, but turned into such a tiring process. We gained a lot of wisdom and had some huge perspective shifts. I don’t regret it at all, because in the end we have a beautiful home… but if we could go back we would have done a lot of things differently. We have learned invaluable lessons about relationships. Its funny how the people that you see as your closest friends can shift so easily. I have learned that the most valuable relationships are the ones that are the most balanced… those who not only take what you have to offer, but also give back. Balanced relationships like that are so hard to find these days. Its easy to get caught up in relationships where you are always giving and just as easy to get caught up in relationships where you are always taking. I am really learning to be a good steward of the time that I have been given here by learning how to invest that time in the realm of relationships. The law of sowing and reaping is just as true in relationships as it is anywhere else.  This past year has also been a roller coaster as far as jobs and finances go. For a young married couple chris and i both were making very good money. We were trying to be smart with it, but at 22 with little life experience in regards to having money I could only be so smart. We did pay off a considerable amount of credit card debt and made some big purchases with cash rather than using credit but our saving skills were seriously lacking. I thought I was doing good putting $50 in savings every paycheck… oh if i had only known! As we were saving for the down payment on our house, nearly half our check was going right into savings. We learned how to live on a tight budget and I am thankful for that. The day that we closed on our house (which was in October… 7 months after the process began… and 2 months after the house was officially completed) Chris’ salary position was eliminated. We were thankful that he still had the option to stay with the company, but that meant going back to commission sales. Now, I had been on commission sales all year and hadn’t been doing as well as I did when I first started. With both of us being on full commission and sales being slow for the whole company we knew we had to make a move. So at the beginning of December I decided to move to an hourly position at the same company. Chris decided to do the same. Although it was going to be over 50% less than what we had been making just a few months earlier it would be consistent and especially with me nearing the end of my pregnancy it would be less stressful. Literally one week after we made the move to hourly our company shut down its entire sales department and let several hundreds of people go. We both would have lost our jobs if we hadn’t made the move we did. God is faithful. Over the last 3 months there were times I would stress out about money only to be reminded of God’s faithfulness in the little things. We have ALWAYS been provided for. God didn’t bring us to where we are now to abandon us. Of course I still have my moments when I wonder how things are going to work out, but God always reminds me He is in control. Such a blessed assurance we have in our Savior and Provider.

He is the same yesterday, today and forevermore.

Selah.