I'm a bum

Ok, I admit that I’m a bum for not posting last week. My lame excuse is the Super Bowl. And I’m not sorry, because it was a heck of a game! I wonder how many kids out there went out and starting practicing a one-handed catch against their heads. So now I’m back to posting. I’ve had a lot of thoughts running around in my head that I’ve wanted to get down, but just haven’t had the time to get them down.

Susie is 15 weeks along today and the baby on the widget is looking less and less like an alien, which is good. We have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. I’ve read that you can tell the gender of the baby at this point, but the next ultrasound isn’t scheduled until our next visit. They have an ultrasound machine in the doctor’s office, so maybe we’ll catch them on a slow day and they’ll take a look.

One thing that makes this whole thing fun is having friends in all different stages of baby-making. I’d like to say congratulations to our friends Mike and Kelly McFadden and their addition of a little baby boy named Campbell. You can see pictures of them and Campbell here. We also have a couple friends in our Bible study group here in Owensboro that are pregnant. I think it’s kinda fun to look at these ladies to get an idea of what Susie will look like in a few months. Susie has a little tummy that's really starting to show now and it’s beautiful. Tonight the three of them were sitting in order of due date on the couch. They looked like the Cingular bars.

We are struggling with a little bit of uncertainty. There are some things that we need to figure out in a short period of time. One thing we don’t have nailed down is childcare for when Susie goes back to school this fall. Most of our friends here are from here and have family in the area. With all the moving around we’ve done we don’t have that advantage of dropping baby off at Grandpa and Grandma’s on short notice. And with Susie going to school almost three hours away in Bloomington, we aren’t sure how that will work out. We do know that the fact that she’s in school is a blessing because now her schedule is so much more flexible and she’ll be able to spend more time caring for the baby than if she was working a full-time job. But we’re checking around in Bloomington and looking at different options and we know that we will figure it out. (Christen, if you’re reading this, you should really transfer from Louisville to Indiana so you can take care of our baby. :) We’ll keep asking.)

We also are starting to come to grips with how much having a baby costs. The one thing we didn’t count on was the fact that our deductible doesn’t count towards our annual out-of-pocket maximum. Also, since we found out about the pregnancy in December, we met the deductible with the doctor’s visits in 2007 and now we have to meet it again in 2008.

Now, I don’t write all that to complain, but more to describe our thoughts and how we’ve been processing them. We’ve spent time discussing it together and getting frustrated together and then realizing together that we are incredibly spoiled. I have been blessed with a great job with a great health insurance plan so we are only responsible for our share, not the whole cost. We live in a country with a well developed health care system that regularly monitors and delivers healthy babies in a clean, safe environment. The timing is perfect because Susie can have the baby in the summer between semsters. We’ve been blessed to the point where more money out-of-pocket means we eat out less or go to the movies less; it doesn’t mean we’re going into debt. We live in a safe house and have warm clothes. We have money to pay for heat in the winter and money to put gas in cars that are reliable. Our stomachs are filled whenever they get hungry (and maybe more often than that, judging by my love handles). Susie has been blessed with a fellowship that actually pays her to go to school at IU. We are so blessed and yet we are so quick to focus on the negative and what we see as deficiencies in our lives.

In our small realm of friends and family I can immediately bring to mind people who are dealing with situations that make ours pale in comparison. When I sit and ponder this fact it is incredibly humiliating to realize how much I focus on myself. I’ve mentioned Matthew 6 before in this blog, but God keeps bringing it to my mind – probably because I need to consider it a little better. He talks about how he takes care of the birds and the flowers and how we’re so much more important than they are. One of God’s names is Jehovah Jireh, which means “God who provides.” Do I believe He provides or do I just say I believe it? Because if I truly believe it I don’t worry about the fact that we don’t have child care lined up yet and I don’t worry about the fact that it’s going to cost more out of our pockets than we originally estimated. Instead, I can focus on what we are blessed with - those things that I listed above - and rest in the assurance that God has our best interests in mind.

There’s one more thing that I specifically left off the list of what we’ve been blessed with, but I’ve alluded to it a couple times in this post. We’ve been blessed with the greatest group of friends here in Owensboro and around the country. We’ve already had a number of our youth calling dibs on watching the baby, and the support we feel from our church family and both our extended families is mind-blowing. So thank you to all of you that are reading this that fall into that group. Know that we love and appreciate you, and that we may be calling on you in the near future for support, prayers, wisdom, love, and babysitting.