Change in perspective

It's amazing how much a baby changes things! Before Micah came into our lives, Leon and I were looking at change as a bad thing. We loved our life, we loved each other, and we didn't want a baby ruining any of that. 


But now that the little man has come, and we have learned that loving him while still loving each other is easier than we thought, we have come to embrace a little bit of change, both in our relationship and in our personal lives. One of the biggest changes that Micah has brought to my life is my perspective on God.

Leon and I have been through a lot of ups and downs during our first year of marriage, and a lot of the downs had to do with negative experiences in church, and with pastors in our lives. I will spare everyone the details of these negative experiences, but suffice it to say that our experiences left us a little sour on church and church leaders. Ok, "a little sour" is an understatement....we were hurt, and we were pissed, even to the point where we didn't want anything to do with church people. (Sorry, but I made a commitment to be honest, no matter how terrible my thoughts were).

Getting over those feelings toward church has proven to be a trick for us. We just want to see more people who are authentically living life for Jesus, instead of people who just talk a good talk from principles they learned in Seminary, and they are not living a life like Christ modeled for us at all. 

I had thought until now that I was just frustrated with the church. But as I dig deeper into those feelings, I am starting to realize that I wasn't just upset with the church, but with God too. I felt like we had been abandoned by Him, that He was missing, and that He shouldn't have allowed certain things to happen to us when we were trying to serve Him with our whole hearts. 

I let those feelings go on a lot longer than I should have, and it is just now, when I look at my baby boy, and I cannot help but see the beauty and glory of God's everyday miracles in His sweet little face, and small little fingers and toes, that I am starting to see God for who He truly is again. When Micah's eyes start focusing on us more and more each day. When he smiles, even though he doesn't know what he is doing yet. When he stops crying when he hears my voice or Leon's voice....All these sweet little precious moments in time that I will treasure forever would never have been possible if God hadn't randomly decided to bless us with this incredible baby boy. He was formed out of 2 cells, and grew to this amazing, perfectly healthy boy that we now get to hold and cuddle. God was not absent in our lives, instead, He was preparing the way for us to be able to love and provide for this amazing baby boy who deserves the whole world, and He was making us into the kinds of parents He knew we needed to be for Micah.


I would like to say I am completely over my recent lapse in judgment when it comes to God, but I am not out of the woodwork just yet. But with every passing day, and every little glance from my almost 1 month old, my heart melts more and more, and God shows Himself to me over and over again in the eyes of His precious creation Micah. And I am starting to fall in love with my Father again because of my baby boy! What an awesome God we have who will not give up on us but who will bless us and bless us and relentlessly pursue us until we simply cannot resist His ultimate love!

Sleeping Micah

Of course I think my son is adorable...I mean, I am his mother, and by that definition alone, I am bound to think he's amazing; but besides that fact, the truth is that he truly is completely adorable! :) I have been taking pictures ad nauseam since we got home from the hospital, and since he is less than a month old and all he really does is sleep at this point, the majority of those pictures happen to be of him sleeping. I can't help it, I just think he is so cute when he sleeps!

There is nothing more peaceful than when I watch my baby boy sleep. Sometimes he smiles, sometimes he punches the air, and sometimes he even laughs. I started thinking about how peaceful he is and how much trust he puts in us to take care of him. Regardless of the kind of parents Leon and I will be, Micah has no choice but to trust that we will take good care of him and will act in his best interest.

I think that same trust my baby boy puts in me can teach me so much about how I need to trust my Heavenly Father. The only difference is that I am fooled by the illusion that I have control over my own life, but I will inevitably mess things up for myself. I think if I spent more time just trusting God to take care of me and lead me, and less time fighting against Him, I may just sleep as peacefully as my sweet baby boy! And the good thing is that God won't ever mess things up for us.

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He will make your paths straight."

Proverbs 3:5-6

Micah's birth day

I finally got the video of Micah's birth day finished and up on YouTube, after only 3 weeks. I think it speaks for itself, so feel free to click here to watch it if you are interested.

Ridiculously Stubborn Cord

I have to say we are very grateful to have a healthy and happy 3 week old baby boy...he was almost 9 pounds when he was born, so we know that he was getting plenty of nutrition while in the womb. That is all well and good, but the downside is that we now have a tiny black little friend who just won't seem to go away: the umbilical cord!

It just took us going to see our friends who had a baby boy 11 days after we had Micah, who's cord has already fallen off, to make us realize that this is not normal. We have been cleaning it with alcohol every time we change his diaper, just the way the pediatrician said to, and it is still very much attached. Last Thursday, we even went in to the pediatrician's office, and he put something on it that was supposed to dry it up faster...but all we have now is a cord we are still dealing with, only this now, when we clean it, Micah screams in pain....fabulous!

This is incredibly hard for a mother to sit there and watch her baby cry because he is in so much pain, but I know that we have to dig in there to have a prayer of drying this stubborn thing out! I felt like a failure as a mother because maybe we hadn't been cleaning it well enough from the beginning, and now we have to deal with this thing that hurts him all the time...it's just no fun.

So right now, I am sitting in the glider in Micah's room, watching my wonderful husband (who has agreed to do all the cord cleanings since I have a weak stomach when it comes to this) clean the painful cord, and try and dry the remaining little thread that is still attached. Micah at this point has cried himself to sleep on the changing table, and Leon is taking this opportunity to cut the dry, outer parts of the cord off, so that the inner core can be dried by the air, and hopefully fall off asap! (Don't worry, he isn't cutting the cord itself off).

I had to take a picture because it was so cute, and now that Micah isn't screaming, I can relax and talk about my pure and total hatred for this umbilical cord!

So please pray that it will fall off tonight....we certainly are! I have never heard of anyone having this problem with the cord, but if there is anyone out there who has, please let me know so I don't feel like a total loser! :)

"Beauty from Ashes"

I am borrowing the title of this post from a section of Beth Moore's updated Breaking Free study. Thanks to my mom's relentless pursuit to get Leon and me to watch a video from this study, we have heard a lot lately of how God is so faithful to bring beauty out of the ashes in our lives. And as good as this message is, I do not think it would have spoken to us as much if we had not experienced this exact thing in our own lives.

When Leon and I met, we were just climbing out of the ashes in our lives which were brought on by divorce, pain from church experiences, broken engagements, and betrayal on all different levels. As we had been working through that pain, and rediscovering who God is in it all, we met each other, and helped each other see a different side of God, life, and reality. We fell in love very quickly, got married, and now have this incredible new baby boy to show for it. And what's more, is that we are more complete people as a result of having come through the ashes in our lives. 

So not only did God alone bring us through the pain that people in our lives had brought upon us, but in such a short time, He brought us to the incredible marriage that we both only dreamed about, and now he brought us this precious gift of a perfect baby boy. And in our lives, we can certainly say that God has brought beauty out of ashes in Leon's life and in my life, and has made up for the time we had lost to a greater degree than we could have ever anticipated, just like He said He would!

Below is a verse that got me through so much heartache about 2 years ago. In my life, it was a promise from God that He would make up for everything that had been taken from me. My prayer is that everyone will know and believe that whatever you have gone through or are going through, God is faithful to make up for it, and bless you beyond your wildest dreams if you just trust Him to do so. I am not just speaking truth from a book, but I know this to be true in my own life. So just trust, and look forward to the day when God will fully restore everything and will make up for all that was ever taken from you!

"I will make up to you for the years that the swarming locust has eaten." 
Joel 2:25

Postpartem blues...what the heck?!

Ok I understand that we are going to get fat during pregnancy. We are going to have swollen ankles because our bodies are retaining water like crazy when we have a huge child in our abdomen. And I don't like it, but I understand that childbirth is going to hurt like hell....just look at the sheer physics of an 8lb watermelon coming out of a pinhole. But what the heck is the purpose of us feeling so sad afterwards?! 

I mean, we make it through pregnancy gracefully (or ungracefully in my case), and we have this amazing new child to show for it, and how do we get to enjoy it? By crying our eyes out! Doesn't seem fair does it? 


The day I got home from the hospital I cried when I saw that Micah liked his wipe warmer and didn't cry when we changed his diaper anymore. Then I cried when I saw that my parents left us some coffee in the pantry from their stay at our house while we were in the hospital. Then I proceeded to cry on the bed for the next 2 days for no reason at all. I just got sad, and I cried and cried and cried. Leon didn't know what to do, and the saddest thing of all was that he thought he had done something, but the truth was that I was just crying for no reason. 

I know that some people have this to a greater degree than others. Some have thoughts of hurting their babies, some don't. I haven't had any of those thoughts, but I do know of several people who did, and had to get over it with some serious help. I guess I just felt like a freak for having these unexplainable feelings of sadness that I couldn't get rid of, until I heard from some of my other mommy friends on Facebook. Just knowing that a ton of other people had these same feelings to different degrees made me feel better...and that also made me realize how important it is for us to be honest about our true feelings because it just may help someone else. 

So to everyone who was honest with me, I just want to thank you for helping me through it. And encourage everyone to keep being real with each other about our struggles and triumphs, because I am sure motherhood will have its share of both!

Pregnancy, not so much....mommyhood, HELL YEA!!

I have always heard about how everyone loves being pregnant. The feel of the baby kicking inside of you; the miracle of life right in your abdomen; the beauty of the growing baby showing itself in your ever-changing body.....I unfortunately had a different experience with pregnancy: nausea, swollen ankles, an ever-alert sense of smell, a constantly-increasing waddle, horrible back pain, and every day moving further and further from my original body shape that I had come to know and love!

Ok I know that sounds a little pessimistic of a viewpoint, but honestly, I was not good at pregnancy, nor did I enjoy it! BUT on the flip side, all I have heard of motherhood is: sleeplessness; screaming babies; marriages failing because of the added stress.....and the great news is that just as pregnancy gave me the opposite reaction than I was expecting, so has motherhood! 

Motherhood for me has been one of the most amazing things I have ever experienced in my whole life! Not that I am a pro at it by any stretch (I mean, it has only been 2 weeks!), but it is not only incredible to now hold this precious, perfectly healthy, beautiful baby boy (who a mere 2 weeks ago was kicking the crap out of my ribs), but to see my incredible husband step into a dad role so naturally has been one of the biggest blessings of all.

Because I hated pregnancy so much, it was hard for me to blog about it without seeming like a huge downer....but this blog will attempt to capture not only my life, and family, but it will also share my thoughts, however crazy they may be, on stumbling my way through (hopefully) becoming a Godly wife and mommy in the new dynamic of our family of 3! I am going to share my real thoughts, good and bad...and will not just be stating the politically and religiously correct ones, so I hope you stay tuned and enter into the dialogue with me and share your real thoughts. The more real we can be with each other, the better off we are all is a larger community! 

Hope you stay tuned....