Laughter

Last night, for the first time, we watched as Sadie gave the world her first laugh. It was warbled and erratic, but unmistakable in it's intent. She shook and smiled and laughed. The lights in the room flickered, a spotlight shown across the room, illuminating her joy and almost shock, at the faces we made to cause such laughter. Magical. One of the best moments of my life to date.

The cliches are true, every single one.

Hello everyone.
It's has been almost seven months since we last wrote. Our plan was to update this blog a few times a week for the sake of keeping everyone informed without having to update each person separately and tell the same stories over and over again. However when we got past the half way point of pregnancy and started to really get our lives ready for our first child, we lost the initiative to continue writing every week. We didn't even announce the birth on here! Our daughter Sadie, is now 75 days old, and has been in almost perfect health since we brought her home. The almost is in reference to a slight fever that she fought off in her third week of life. My wife has been sick for a few times but is the most wonderful mother ever to be a mother. I may be somewhat bias, however I stand by my statement. In the coming weeks we will try to be more vigilant in our blogging.

Half way point!

20 weeks

Her wise, and kind advice is an indescribable blessing.

I am so thankful for the wise advice of my mother-in-law. I feel less anxious about taking care of our baby and raising our children-knowing that I have her support. She recently spoke with regret about the pre-formed expectations that we sometimes have for our children when they are born. She explained how she expected her oldest daughter to be just as sensitive as her mother and her son was thought to carry a similar disposition to his father. She related to them with these personality expectations but realizes now how her misconceptions caused her to be overly sensitive to her tougher, independent, daughter and less understanding of her sensitive, affectionate, son.

My mother-in-law encouraged me to set aside any expectations I might have and simply get to know my baby and instead of trying to anticipate my child's needs, to rather try to listen and empathize. She said that children want to know you understand them rather than to try to automatically be everything they need and to "fix" everything for them.

-Julia

We will not be individuals for at least 20 years

When the baby is born, and begins to grow, we will cease to be whoever and whatever we want to be. We will be parents...someone else's parents. Our identities as a mother and father will be the only identity that our children will know. Of course, we can choose what kind of parents we want to be and we will have a unique identity in the choices we make-however, we will still be parents. This thought is striking since this will be the first time that we will be seen as an entity and our choices will so directly change someone else's life.

Everyone needs to have something that fulfills them and certainly parents cannot lose their identities completely, yet our children probably won't recognize us as people until they are well into early adulthood. I say this as a young adult who now sees their parents and the choices they made as one human-being to another-instead of just "my parents". We have made a choice to surrender our lives and let them cease to be about us.

-Julia

The reason for the blogging

Dear readers,
This blog will keep you updated on our lives and the progression of our pregnancy and subsequent life of our child (until he/she is of the blogging age themselves). Really though, this is our way of telling all of you the incredible fun we are having! This is the best times of our lives; welcome and we hope you find something interesting.

Philip