The waiting game

also titled: I hate waiting.


There's nothing worse than that feeling of waiting for something to happen, knowing that it IS going to happen, though you're not really sure when, but sometime, however you have NO CONTROL over just exactly when it's going to happen, so all you can do is wait. Even worse is when you get the news that the thing you're waiting for could happen ANY TIME NOW, but it's just not happening yet.

I totally blame my doctors for my present state of frustration.

After all, they're the ones who told me, a WEEK AGO, that the twins could be here any time now really, because I've already started dilating and Ruby is head down and active labor could start any. minute. now. Cue a long, long , loooooong week of waiting, hoping, expecting, etc. They made it even worse by telling me on Thursday that I was dilated even further and 50% effaced and the twins could be here ANY MINUTE.

But it's  Monday. And they're not here.

I have walked, jumped, eaten spicy food, prayed, deep cleaned my house, walked some more, eaten more spicy food, prayed some more, deep cleaned some more, cried, begged, pleaded, and tried just about everything else to get my labor jumpstarted, and it is not happening. It's just not.

Despair.

It totally doesn't help that I'm impatient by nature, and that I'm pretty much over being unable to, you know, bend over, or touch my toes, or get in and out of the tub without help. Or hold my big kids in my lap (what lap?). Or roll over in the bed. Or drive. Or. Or. Or. The list could go on forever.

Also - I'm just ready to meet these little buggers. Truth be told, I'm a little bit excited about the challenge of raising twins, and I want to get to it already. I know. Crazy, right? It's how I roll.

But they aren't here yet. And I'm waiting. I hate waiting.


So if you think about it, throw a little prayer up for me over the next few days, and hope with me that these twins will decide to get their act together already and stop keeping their mama waiting. Please and thankyou!

in the kitchen

The kitchen is my sanctuary. It's the one place in the house I can go and get blissfully lost in the work I'm doing. Maybe it's because the kids know that if they will just leave mom alone for a bit, something yummy is coming. Maybe they sense that I need, NEED the catharsis of making SOMETHING. Maybe it's the combination of both, because they sure have a fit when I try to make anything that isn't edible. Either way, the kitchen is my special, happy place. I work out my creative urges, and release some stress in the process. Bread-making probably tops the list of my favorite kitchen-time activities. I enjoy the timelessness of it, the nostalgia, the sense that I am tied to the past, to my ancestors, to women everywhere throughout history that have worked out their frustrations (and fed their families) on a lump of dough. In fact, I've gotten downright ritualistic about it. I wear my Nonnie's apron, gifted to me by my grandfather this past winter. I stir the dough with my grandma's wooden spoon, old and showing who knows how many years of use. I cover the dough with my Ga-Ga's tea towel. It's stained and it has a few holes and has seen better days, but I love it. If I ever get my hands on an antique wooden dough bowl, I might actually swoon. Though I have never swooned. Except when I was 14 months pregnant and Davey was getting his eyebrow stitched back together. But I digress. The point is that I love the feeling that each one of those beautiful ladies is there with me, represented in the treasured items that I'm fortunate enough to have had passed on to me. And in the art of cooking, which they passed down to me, and I'm so fortunate to have learned from them. I look forward to passing this down to my own girls some day, so that they can make their escapes to the kitchen and commune with their past.

(Just the other night, Davey made mac and cheese with the girls. They pulled their tiny chairs up to the stove, put on their cute little aprons (Punkin made very sure that Daddy wore an apron, too) and helped to boil and stir and mix. Since that night they've made mac and cheese at least twice, and every time, Punkin will not get started until they are all wearing their aprons. She may look like her Daddy, but there's a lot of Mama in there, too. :)

A year of Passion.

So. It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything. 2013 was a long, strange, crazy year. Definitely not all bad, it’s just that, frankly, I don’t remember half of it. Maybe that’s because so very much happened. I started working at a really great little bakery, only to find out 3 weeks later that I was pregnant (and while on a camping trip, no less.) Davey got a second job working as a part-time youth minister at our church, and suddenly, life was a whirlwind. There was No. Time. No time for anything. Somehow we made it through summer and fall and bam! Christmas and New Year’s was here, and now it’s February 2014 and I don’t even know how I got here. I do know that we found out at the first of the year that we are having twins, who should be here sometime in the next month or so. A boy and a girl. So exciting. So overwhelming. But it’s been a year of overwhelming, so really, what else is new? I also know that I came into this new year feeling like something really had to give – the whirlwind was just too much – the piles of laundry and dirty dishes I couldn’t keep up with, the hubby I never got to see, all the things that broke (and I do mean ALL the things. Like, EVERYTHING broke this year), and all the stuff that just piled up and I didn’t even care because I was buried in my own pile of overwhelmed and pregnant. And then came TCTC (that’s the Tennessee Christian Teen Convention) and there I was, wanting to go but having a meltdown because we had just found out about the twins and we were leaving in 3 hours and I hadn’t packed and didn’t even know where I was going to sleep and I was just tired and did I mention overwhelmed? But I muscled thru, and Davey gritted his teeth (he's been doing that a lot l, and we went, and it was wonderful. We ended up with a room together (so nice!) and suddenly, I found time to relax, take a deep breath, see old friends, and remember what it felt like to be somewhat human again. And suddenly the last 8 months of Overwhelmed weren’t going to cut it anymore. During one of the last sessions of the convention, the speaker challenged us to ask God for a word for the year, and my heart started hollering. I’d actually been looking for that word for two weeks or more. The One Word that would fight the Overwhelmed. And so I asked. And boom. There it was. The elusive thing I had been looking for, that I needed to get through whatever this year has to bring. That I had been lacking, losing for so long that I had forgotten what it even felt like. And yes, when the Word hit me in the chest, I cried. It was very Pentecostal up in that convention center for a few minutes. Davey just gave me that “awww, you’re so pregnant and hormonal!” squeeze that I’ve been getting A LOT lately and asked me what started the tears, and I managed to choke out that I had found my Word. And? That word is PASSION. That thing that keeps us pushing forward when we love something, when we really want something, when that something is so important that everything else fades. I used to be passionate about lots of things - crafting, cooking, decorating, taking a shower, my husband, my kids - but my passion for just about everything had completely evaporated over the last few years of babies and work and stress and just trying to get by. A life without passion is no life at all, but it was what I’d been living for so long. Fear and exhaustion and TOO MUCH had choked my Passion and buried it so deep that I wasn’t even sure I could find it again. Some days I’m still not sure if I have. But now that I know what’s missing, it gives me something to work for, and the apathy, the Overwhelmed, is getting smaller. Now, I’m not gonna lie. I’m still pregnant with twins, and exhausted, and I spend a lot of time just laying on the couch, but gosh darn it all, I’m doing it with Passion! I took on a fun crafting challenge - crocheting a 365-day scarf (I only have to crochet one line a day, so how hard can that be?!) - and I figure it’s going to take a lot of Passion to raise twins and a 3 year old AND a 4 year old, and no, every day is not going to be perfect and the Overwhelmed will creep in and I’ll want nothing more than to crawl into bed and wait for my kids to grow up and take care of themselves already, but then the passion will speak up, and remind me that I love these crazy kids, my beautiful family, and I’ll get out of bed, maybe even take a shower, and keep pushing on, because that’s what you do when you feel passionate about something. You give it all you’ve got, even when what you’ve got isn’t much. It's still enough. So. Here’s to a year of Passion.