When the hair just isn't working...

I buzz it off.

He is the third baby to have his head buzzed.  While I like baby hair, scruffy greasy hair is not cute and neither is male pattern baldness.   I am never so attached to their baby hair that I won’t buzz it off at the slightest sign of one of these characteristics.

I’m exploding with design ideas lately.  I think part of it is that I am looking forward to spending more time at home once little Peabody arrives and I have so many projects I want to do!  I’ve been getting very distracted by ideas like upholstering a headboard (like this one from Design Sponge), creating an office space in our bedroom, refinishing furniture…   I’ve had to try to make myself focus on forming a design for the nursery instead of taking on the whole house at once.  Part of my problem is that in my search to get baby room inspiration, I keep coming upon all kinds of good ideas!  It doesn’t help that I hit upon some fantastic blogs with all kinds of beautiful things and do it yourself projects like the above mentioned Design Sponge, also Creature Comforts, Decor8, and Apartment Therapy. 

 Although I might also try it in aqua too:

I’d like to make some curtains, the crib bumper, crib skirt, and maybe a couple pillows, but one thing that was particularly hard was finding fabric I actually liked.  Here are some suggestions from my neurotic web-searching of good fabric sites: Fashionable Fabrics, Fabric Worm, Sew, Mamma, Sew, and PurlSoho.  Of course if you are really enterprising, you can even design your own fabric at Spoon Flower.  Just as a seed idea, here are some prints I immediately liked:

Alexander Henry: 2D Zoo, Bird Seed, Cotton, Poppies Bright, and lots more..

Michael Miller: Tweet Tweet

Heather Ross

Anna Griffin Riley: Circus

(I’d love reader in-put on some other good fabric sources though!)

 

I think birds are going to be my theme, and I ran across this adorable do it yourself bird mobile for above the crib.

 

I’d like to either paint or apply some birds to the walls.  My thought is that I might do the room a muted yellow and paint some white and gold birds on the walls– it all depends on what I find for a chair and a rug in the room though, since those will determine my colors to a large extent.  For birds or other designs you can apply to a wall without painting, look no further than MyCurlyCue.

  

For the crib, I’ve been thinking about a vintage iron one and am drawn to the idea of painting it a bright color that stands out from the rest of the room, like this yellow one:

AND, I just happened to find one on Craigslist

 

 Here are some before pictures so you can see what I’m able to come up with in the next four months of office-to-nursery transformation.  The office is definitely the ugliest room in our house, so it will be an easy challenge!

 

The lighting was pretty good and the kids were mostly happy

Athanasius and Canon

Anwyn and Fox

 I took these Thursday morning when I should have been teaching school, but the lighting was pretty good so I interrupted the kids’ play to call them down for a photo shoot.  Canon balked at wearing the striped shirt because he was a mouse and didn’t want to be a handsome mouse.  I told him that he could put on the ugly shirt after pictures.

Now I really have to go do school.

Anwyn, Fox, Athanasius, and a handsome mouse.

Let’s see, Heinz and Sandy, David and Michelle, Caitlin, Zac and Freyja, Aileen and Jason, Meghan, Eric, Anwyn, Canon, Athan, Fox, Andrew and I, Jarrett, Taite and Matthias were all standing in our kitchen getting ready to have pizza and having prayed, Erin asked to make one small request, “Could she borrow some maternity clothing?”

I screamed and then cried and then pretty much all of us cried for joy.

So here we have 3 months, 5 months, 7 months, and done!  And perchance they all wore gray that night.  And every last one of these babies are B-O-Y-S!!

Little Fox will have three cousins very close to his age but I am sure he will want the rest to understand every now and then that he is in fact the oldest.

“So when are you guys going to have kids/ have more kids?”

I’d be very curious to know if there are any couples out there who appreciate this question.

For people who have no problem having children this question could seem a little prying, although it gets asked enough that they usually have stock response ready.  For people who have trouble having kids it can be heartbreaking.  I wonder sometimes, if a person had to re-phrase the question to be a little more accurate and say “When are you guys going to stop just having sex and start having kids?”  would they still ask it?  The fact is, if you are addressing a married couple, that’s what you are really asking, even if it’s not what you thought you were asking.  And isn’t that a little personal when you stop to think about it?

Within reason, I am usually a big fan of Christians being open and honest with one another in a loving manner.  I think that’s what real community is made of.  We should share each other’s burdens, encourage, and cry with one another, which means I think there can be a legitimate way discovering if a couple is struggling with infertility with an intent to help and without being hurtful.  A lot of times this problem is solved for you because if you are a close friend, the person struggling might choose to share her pain with you.  If not, before I go poking about, I try to remind myself to ask pointedly my motives for asking.  Am I just curious?  Am I harboring even the littlest bit of judgment deep down about why they haven’t had children/ more children?  I think some people are just so happy about having children of their own that they think everyone else should be too.  Of course they could be just concerned for a friend they think might be suffering silently, and want to come along side of her to be a comfort.

When you are a friend asking out of concern, hopefully will come across as it is meant.  I can’t quite remember how a friend of mine asked the question, something like “do you feel pretty okay with that (we had been on the subject of having kids/not being able to have kids), or has that been hard for you?”  There was no mistaking her concern for shear curiosity or judgement.  She then told me that she and her husband had already been praying for us about it.  They’d already been praying!  She’d suspected I was struggling because she’s a good friend and she knows me, and she’d already started doing something about it– without even having to ask or confirm first.  What a blessing that we have a Father who knows every struggle of our brothers and sisters and isn’t confused by our feeble prayers even if we don’t know all the details!

Even though it’s a much less intimate subject, I think approaching a single person’s love life can use a lot of the same tools.  Dating and relationships are a much more public affair, but it still takes sympathy when broaching the subject.  I don’t know of any single girls over the age of 25 who love being asked, “So are you dating anyone?/seeing anyone special?/any guys in your life?/(and my favorite– the back-handed compliment:) why isn’t a beautiful girl like you dating anyone?”

I sympathize with them because when people ask me when we were going to have kids, I have wanted to say, ”Don’t you believe God is in control of these things?  And if He is, wouldn’t I already have a child (or six) if that’s what He wanted for me?  So that must not be what He wants for me right now, right?”  Instead I sometimes just say “Yeah, it’s funny how we think we’re in control of things like that, and then we realize we aren’t…”

Sometimes when people have discovered that you are having trouble they will even suggest solutions.  “Why don’t you just adopt?” they might ask, but even my very limited knowledge leads me to believe that adoption is not a simple, solve-all answer.  There is a reason, after all, why people spend thousands of dollars out-of-pocket to get interventions that may or may not help them concieve their own child.  First there’s coming to grips with the fact that you can’t have children, then you have to face the fact that you will never get to see what a child from you and your spouse’s loving relationship would look and act like, you have to face the fear of discovering your love for another woman’s child is inadequate to the task of nightly feedings and lifelong commitment (even though that fear might be unjustified), you might have to help the child struggle through feelings of rejection– all things that don’t even come into play when you are “having your own child”.

Despite this, I don’t feel like I have had anything to complain about.  The journey through childless-ness has been nothing but a blessing.  I’ve been telling myself recently that there are several lessons I want to remember from it and never forget.

First, it has made me realize my own inability to plan or do anything on my own in a very powerful, very loving way.  It has humbled me to the silent struggles of others, and made me more cautious to assume anything about a person’s motives or condition.  It actually has made me weirdly sad for people who are allowed to think they are in control of their fertility their whole life and never learn God’s amazing care for them.  It also has made me feel like part of an elite class of women, again, as strange as that may sound– the barren women.  When I look back over the Old Testament, it is absolutely riddled with stories of women who are barren or have a lot of trouble conceiving.  Almost all of the women of note in the line of promise, and many, many of the women who had powerful roles and stories throughout the Bible struggled with this.  And the fact that so many of their struggles are included in the canon revealed to me that God must take a special interest in their pain, and that He certainly does take a special care of them and bless them tremendously.

It is certainly still hard but like a lot of trials, it has also been a huge blessing and has made me aware of areas I need to grow in– lessons I hope I don’t soon forget.