Babies, Blueberries, 'Ballers, Oh My!

Life seems to go in fits and starts. A few months will seem to hold nothing significant at best, or at worst, a host of significance, each one of which makes you want to cry. Then those seasons come along that seem fraught with, well, good news. I'm no expert in handling, or explaining, either of those seasons, but suffice it to say that God is wise in his conception of seasons, wherein spring indeed follows winter. And as if not enough, the summer brings the bounty that spring has only hinted at.

So there is my weak attempt at Sunday morning philosophizing as a preamble to what season we, Weavers, are amidst. We are seeing the lights of spring, and the bounty of summer after a cold, dry fall and winter where bad news seemed to lurk around most corners, where even in the good, we waited cynically for the proverbial "other shoe" to drop. An unsold house lurked next door, sapping up our monetary and emotional resources throughout the winter. It's 4-walls lurked in our periphery, a reminder of happier days past when our prior tenants, some of our best friends, lived in community with us. But last summer and fall saw the end of that dream, as their lives took one dramatic turn after another ultimately leading them out of our humble rental home, and leaving us with the whiplash of all those fits and starts we'd endured with them. The most traumatic perhaps being their seperation and divorce. How had our perceived communal bliss turned so wintry dead in just a few short months? And to that backdrop of sadness and confusion, we endured death within our walls. I had a miscarriage in the fall, dampening our hopes that things may be turning around, firming our growing hardness toward life and God, and God-knows-what-else.

But life ebbs and flows, we didn't see it then, perhaps only had dim hope that it would turn around. And by-God, it has. All is not perfect in 2009, fallout from the pain of 08's harsh seasons still lingers, and new disappointments arise, but we have renewed hope...a baby girl in my belly for one. At 21 weeks, my tummy is growing, as is our confidence that maybe this one is for real. We love her already and are immensely thankful for life, after so much dying last year.

Perhaps very soon (as in...not in another 3 months as my blogging cycle tends to be), I will touch on the bluberries and ballers alluded to in this post heading. For now, I'll just leave some pics of our baby. The first is a profile...the 2nd, she's looking at you.