He's her real guitar hero

One of the things I've always loved about my husband is his determination. In terms of parenting, this means a determination to make the most of his time with his daughter in the evenings when he gets home from work...and I love watching the two of them play!

An expert noisemaker, Abby loves creating musical masterpieces on her little toy piano and the empty cardboard box that she's decided is a drum kit. Thanks to her dad, she can now add strumming to her repertoire.

Until she decides that the inside of his acoustic guitar is the perfect place to store her blocks...

Waitin' on Caleb: Week 29

We'll call this "The Week Mom's Toes Disappeared."

Caleb's the size of a butternut squash this week--over 15 inches long and weighing about 2.5 pounds. He's taking up just the right amount of space to cause my belly to completely obscure my view of my toes this week. That's a pretty big pregnancy milestone in my book.

In other news, his muscle, lung and brain development are picking up speed and his head is getting bigger to make room for that growing brain. I didn't really need a pregnancy book to clue me in on that last fact...his freakishly low position in my abdomen has made me painfully aware of the fact that his head is growing. My milk cravings are probably due to the fact that his skeletal development is kicking into overdrive and his tiny hardening bones are soaking up a tremendous amount of calcium each day.

Caleb's already proving to be a very active child, and seems to have enrolled himself in some in utero kickboxing classes. My belly is becoming less and less my own with each day that goes by, and Caleb isn't shy about making his presence known with some feisty kicks, punches and spins when I least expect them. Also, he's falling into a regular pattern of throwing dance parties in my belly from about 7 to 9 each night. (Just about the time dinner's starting to settle, I guess...)

Please pray for all the development that's happening in the third trimester. How awesome to know that God is intimately aware of every stage of our son's development, even down to the number of hairs on his tiny head that we won't see for weeks!

Make like a tree

By my best recollection, the fall yard clean-up of my childhood went something like this: My dad would head into the backyard, rake lines in the carpet of leaves and then send us kids out to rake our assigned quadrants into large piles. Each pile had to then be scooped into a bag and dragged somewhere for pickup. I never really paid attention to where those fun piles went after they left the yard, because really, when you're 8 years old, piles of leaves only count when they're easily accessible from your backdoor.

But here in our neighborhood, piles of leaves abound, thanks to a leaf vacuum truck that drives around and weekly sucks whatever you've left on the curb in front of your house into a giant leaf vacuum bag hooked up to a diesel engine. This might be one of the coolest county service vehicles I've ever seen, and I imagine kids all up and down our street probably feel the same way, and race to the window (like Justin and I did) when they hear it coming.

For Abby, this amounts to mom and dad spending an entire afternoon raking and blowing every leaf in both the front and back yards into one enormous pile in front of our house and then waking her up from her nap, zipping her into something warm, and teaching her the fine nuances of leaf pile diving. This kid's got a great life.

You throw like a girl

I love being the mom of a little girl. The clothes are adorable, the toys are familiar, and I have visions of sharing special times together in the future doing girly things like getting our toes pampered at a nail salon. But with all the adorable pinkness that has taken over the family of fish in the past year, I was quite ready to hear the words "It's a boy!" at our 20 week ultrasound.

It strikes me now that we've got a lot of adjusting to do come January (or soon thereafter). For all the talk of how boys and girls are basically the same and are simply conditioned to be either male or female by their parents and their environment, I must say the so-called experts seem to have missed the mark.

Case in point: Abby has, all on her own and (purposefully) without any encouragement from me, decided that pushing her baby doll around in this stroller is a fun thing to do. I have made a determined effort to neither encourage or discourage this type of play, mostly to see how she would develop this skill on her own. I've even tried putting other things in the stroller--magnets, plastic blocks, sippy cups--to see if she was content to use it as more of an all-purpose vehicle. The answer is no. She consistently pushes my suggested item into her playroom, removes it, and inserts a baby doll or some cuddly stuffed animal in its place, then returns to the kitchen to push her charge around the island until I get the point: "Mom, babies go in strollers. Not blocks." To add to the cute femininity, she'll occassionally stop to feed her baby doll a drink from its tiny pink plastic bottle, or occassionally share a sip of whatever she has in her sippy cup. I didn't teach her that.

I have yet to talk to the mom of a boy whose son dedicates the amount of waking hours to caring for his stuffed animals that my daughter does. Sure, they'll drive things around too. Cars mostly, or those little ride on trucks. Even, on occassion, a toy vacuum cleaner (although I'm fairly certain they'd prefer the bubble blowing lawn mower). But a stroller with a baby in it? Nope; the closest I've come is a mom whose son uses his sister's stroller as a transport vehicle for Matchbox cars.

So could it be true? Could there be some innate difference in boys and girls that is part of their basic genetic make-up and not just something they're taught to be? I'm firmly convinced the answer is yes. Sure, there are girls out there who enjoy traditionally male activities. I'm certain our daughter will be one of them, because I know her dad isn't going to let her miss out on fishing trips and backyard soccer games. And there are boys who are enjoy some traditionally female activities. You'd better believe my son will be right there next to me helping Abby and I stir batches of brownie batter when he's old enough. But at our very core, there is something that makes girls distinctly feminine and boys distinctly masculine. And you can bet the family of fish won't be fighting those instincts. On the contrary, we're looking forward to encouraging our son and daughter to embrace who God made them as male and female, and not as some androgynous robots that we'll train to cook and clean or hunt and gather.

And when Abby uses Caleb's tonka trucks to drive her families of dolls around the backyard and Caleb commandeers her stroller to collect his Lego's, we'll share a collective sigh with parents everywhere who understand that boys and girls are just different.

Waitin' on Caleb: Week 28

Caleb's still growing like a weed, but he's got nothing on his mama. At 37 inches around and 15 pounds heavier than I was 7 months ago, I'd like to think I'm winning the guess-who's-growing contest. (Although to his credit, rounding out a belly is significantly simpler than growing things like a nervous system and internal organs.) I've got my son to blame for almost two and a half of those extra pounds, and he's probably over 15 inches long as we head into the third (and thankfully final!) trimester.

Caleb can blink his eyes now, and is most likely sporting some eyelashes by this point. He's able to detect light that filters through my belly, although there's not too much sunshine breaking through the layers of my fall wardrobe. Billions of neurons are developing in his brain and he's still packing on the extra fat he'll need to stay warm once he makes his debut in snowy January.

I'll go for my awful glucose screening test at next week's doctor's appointment, and then we'll be visiting the office every other week instead of monthly from here on out. Things are winding down in the pregnancy department, but the nesting instinct is only starting to kick into high gear and the household baby preparations are just getting started. There's a room to paint, a fan to hang, boxes of clothes to wash and some sleep to stock up on before this baby can arrive!

Please pray with us this week that we would find ways to prepare Abby for the transition from only child to big sister and that our adjustment to a family of four would be a smooth one.

The end of the road

Osito the Blazer
January 2000 - October 2008

It was an unseasonably cold day in Georgia when my dad brought home my new Blazer. Thankfully, he had the foresight to keep me home that day, and to frustrate me further by making me remove and replace all four tires before I was allowed to go anywhere. (This would come in handy later, as it turned out I had a knack for running over sharp objects).

I learned a lot from my gas-guzzling SUV. For instance, I now know that eleven people is too many when you only have five seat belts. (Legally, I believe Sargent Carter referred to this as an "over-capacitated vehicle." As luck would have it, I got t-boned before I could transport my passengers too far.) Also, adding an insanely high number of bumper stickers, antenna balls and even a set of Yosemite Sam mud flaps to a vehicle does in fact make it easier to find in a crowded parking lot. It also makes you look like an idiot.

While watching Destinos, the cheesey Spanish soap opera they thought would help us learn the language, a friend in my Spanish class explained the need to name your transportation. So the big white blazer came to be known as Osito, the name given to the tiny black dog belonging to one of the characters in the show. I appreciate irony.

I managed to get Osito paid off before I graduated from college, and Justin and I have enjoyed our car payment-free marriage. I've long joked that I would drive this car until it died, and in the interest of not putting any more money into it than we had to, we'd even instituted a no-repair policy for minor fixes on the crotchety old blazer, like the thermostat knob that broke, or the visor mirror that was always falling down on my passengers. He was old, he was unreliable, and at his best he only got 17 miles to the gallon. But he got me from point A to point B, he kept me warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and I've got lots of fond memories of the time Osito and I spent together.

Sadly, Osito passed away on October 26. My dreams of driving him until he died came true, and I knew we'd reached the end of the road when Justin and his brother had to push him into a parking space at the repair shop after coasting in with a broken transmission.

My gas-guzzling days are over. Now, with the click of a button, my automatic sliding doors magically open, and I find myself situating my daughter into the backseat of the minivan we've dubbed Penelope. Slipping behind the wheel of my Honda Odyssey and into the heated driver's seat, I check to make sure Abby's sippy cup is close at hand in my center console, next to the diaper bag and the stuffed duck, and it hits me once again: I'm a mom. In a mom van. And I love it.

Farewell, Osito.

Welcome to the family, Penelope.