thoughts today...

I am 24 weeks pregnant today. The baby moves, grows, and is starting to fall into suit of taking over my appearance. Last Sunday in church several women came to find me to say they had no idea I was even pregnant. How encouraging to know my stomach muscles haven't completely lost their touch come number 5! The kids feel baby kick. The life that is expressed on their little faces and in their eyes in that very moment never ceases to cause me to step back and enjoy the mystery of it again in a fresh way. I can't help but smile at their amazed and bewildered smiles. Life. So precious!

We are plugging right along with school. If I can keep up my stingy allowances of 'days off', of which no one really seems to mind!, we will be completed sometime the beginning of May. Ready to be done that time of year anyways seems to really allow its benefits to having a bit of a break before new baby comes the following month. I feel incredibly blessed the timing of this one. Summer vacation. Have a baby. Have sunny and leisurely days to get to know a new someone. Rest and take in the summer heat. Sit in the shade while the kids play. Start the new school year off with now 2 on the books and a somewhat more adjusted 3 month old...and hopefully self! I couldn't have planned it more perfect if I had tried.God is really really good to me.

The weeks seem fuller than I ever remember. Efforts to sit down and have dinner together have had to be more on the strategic home front. That family time is priceless. Sit down. Slow down. Eat. Talk. Look at faces I love and lives I get to be part of. Faces that love me. Little voices that proclaim I'm the best cooker ever. Laughter over absolutely nothing and yet everything I ever want to remember. A look from him. A side joke only we know. He's home here with me. With us. And I love this man who has such a call on his life. The favor of God inexpressibly evident. I like him and he makes me laugh.

Sophia sings. All the time. All day long. Songs just for Boaz, Love Chunk, Baby Love Chunk (to the tune of Love Shack) and God, Come to this heart Oh Lord. She's really rather beautiful to listen to. Gabe and I make eyes and I can see the layers of his heart peeling back with each word, each note. My eyes must say the same thing because we start laughing. How does something so little, so beautiful, cause so much emotion to take over. She sings, All of my days with you, All of my days in Your love, and I hear them and I can't help but pray that is always the song of her heart. I choose in that moment to have a crazy faith in God for my children and I'm moved to pray for them like never before. For assuredly I say to you whoever says to this mountain, 'Be removed and be cast into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart, but believe that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says. "Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them. Mark 11:23-24. 

I am thankful for parents and grandparents and great grandparents who prayed those very prayers for me and who now pray right along side Gabe and I on behalf of these Arrows. Let them be faith filled prayers.

All of your days.

Boys, three of them, and as far as too many dreams to count at this point is concerned, another one! With dark hair. Lots of it. The last one was Chunky himself! and oh how we loved him. No, I have no idea what we are having. A girl would be shocking seeing as I'm obviously prepared in every emotional way for a boy. And I love not knowing!

My midwife comes to my home and sits on my couch. We chat and catch up. That is my appointment in a nutshell and I love that too. Ducks continue to line up in a row and we are well on our way to another home birth.

Kids beam around the house when I spill the news Grammy and Grampy come tomorrow for the day! That's what those special cookies are for. And for us tonight with our Daddy. Chicken in the crock pot. Chicken and biscuits on the menu. Time and no where to go together on the agenda.

Little boys have runny noses and one of those little boys who never naps is napping. It's a slow day. Nothing out of the ordinary. But I'm filled with an extraordinary love. It's Jesus. I know. And He gives the passion to my seemingly mundane days. He fills my heart. Where I feel I'm losing time, he reminds me. It's not quantity it's quality. I lost my box for time some time ago. I can let that make me a bit weepy but something more has been stirred up in me. Remember this: Whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows generously will also reap generously. 2 Corinthians 9:6

That is what I think in terms of you now time. And I don't despise you anymore. God shed some much needed light on you: He can give me the grace to make you count.

Happy (early but right around the corner) Valentine's Day

 If you know us, please know you are loved by this crew, this Valentine's Day!

We love because He first loved us.

OK, so we did have a rocky start. 

Arching of the back= major attitude and defiance. In other words, "Mom, Dad, let me just show you my will right now. I'll break it down nice and easy for you to understand because clearly you are not catching on!"

Nothing an attitude adjustment and some rap cannot fix.

 And a pretty silly daddy!

"But I'm still not going to smile Mom. In fact who is this guy? He looks absolutely ridiculous right now."

 Boys and I love them all!

This gem. She is simply one of a kind and even I find myself mesmerized by her beauty.

Bow ties and Sophia's hair bow tie courtesy of a simple tutorial I found on line.

Feeling creative and crafty after a season of illness= sure sign I am healthy again, loving it, and very very thankful!

a special note to baby...

Baby, you have been christened into the Ockrin home for as long as God allows you the grace to find a space and make it your own. We like you baby. We like the journey God has us on, with you. We even like the 'no box' we have for our 'going to be' family of 7! It is just another opportunity to see God's hand in our very lives. You get to be apart of that very real and tangible confirmation. Why would we despise that or even fear it?

We like having God here, in our home. I know I want the kind of radical faith in all areas of my life to proclaim, I don't know. I don't have all the answers. But I trust, completely. With you baby, I get to walk that very desire out. I know it is always apart of His plan to trust Him more and walk in faith. Baby, you are helping to make me a better woman. You help make me a better child of God. You help make me have great faith. You help me put my trust in the best place I ever could. Not myself, my fears, my selfish desires or even what I think I am entitled to. I give it all to God and I trust Him. He is a good Father. How could I ever not? And I have yet to be disappointed. In fact, I am amazed more and more.

Baby, you have helped make pregnancy a breeze this time around. When asked how I am feeling I never, up until this recent bout of restored health, thought in terms of you! You never seemed a factor. And even now, you swoosh around and you flutter and I am reminded you are simply just there. You help make me look healthy. My skin feels nice and my hair grows steady and smoother still. I do not despise extra weight. I even, for the season, get to enjoy it. The weight of you that I carry screams that I am a woman by design and I choose to embrace it.

With good health on the horizon, my resolution to start walking with regular exercise no longer seems so far off in the distance anymore. In fact, a plan has happily already been put into action and when I think of my health, I think of you. I think of all these other precious and crazy babies running around and I think of your handsome-makes my heart skip several beats still, daddy, with that one of a kind pronounced dimple in his masculine chin. It is good to be healthy. It is a treat now to feel the beginnings of it again and I do not take it for granted.

Baby, I feel so blessed when I think of you! Others may think of you and think not enough pros to ever outweigh those cons or maybe just too many negatives altogether, of which I honestly see none. But baby, I am not moving on behalf of what I think and feel. If I truly did you most likely would not be on your little way. That makes my heart ache a little. I am so glad you are on your little (though grand of an entrance it will be!) way.

When I think of you I really see God and I hear Him. He had everything to do with you and your very soul is the definition of precious to Him. He has the best plan for you. Do I really get to be apart of it by giving up things the world tells me I need to hold on to, or go in desperate search of instead? Those things it says will keep me happy? Or make me younger? Or keep my figure more consistent? Or give me more time and conveniences? More freedom? Me? Me? Me?

This is what I would say to them. What could be better than partnering with Him? Do they really know who is God? Do they really know who is their God? Have they ever read Psalm 127? Do they know it proclaims children are His best gift? A gift! I never knew that like I do now, like I am still in this present day finding out. With each of these good gifts the etching from His own very hand goes deeper still and the shading a bit darker yet on the scrolls of my very own heart. And on your daddy's too! I like those wrinkles on those pages. The bumps and ups and downs they represent. The times a season ago I really wrestled with God about you or at least the thought of another you, or good heavens, just plain MORE OF YOU altogether! I recall those pages smudged with tear mark stains. The fear. The agony. The place I was in with absolutely no peace. The wear and tear reminds me this is a cherished book and I love reading our simple and even mundane at times story because I see a much greater one being written and intertwined intermittently simply because we gave Him the pen. I don't even know where that ink jar lies anymore. I am beyond thankful and humbled to be OK with that. Knowing He is calling us and carrying us every step of the way gives peace that surpasses anyone's understanding and even my own at times about you. That is from a work only He can do. And baby, I asked Him to do it. And I have to ask Him to do it still. But that is OK because He does. He always always does.

My womb is blessed to hold you. The fruit of the womb will be His generous legacy. One day I will wake with a womb that simply cannot sustain life like you anymore and not out of choice. I hope to welcome that season and embrace it as I am striving to walk in and embrace this one. However, this is my today, and today, I find you in it. Today, He wants you to be forming for something greater than I could have ever done on my own elsewhere with that more time, with that more freedom, with that more money. Turns out you don't cost much anyways! This is the day the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it.

I am painstakingly aware of the depths of walking in my own purpose and calling that enables me to be apart of something more, which enables you to be apart of that something more too. Something beyond just the diapers. Something beyond the nights when there are 5 of us in bed (like last night and including you!) whereby little to no sleep on my part was actually going on. Beyond the exhaustion stage of a newborn baby. Beyond pregnancy insomnia. Beyond achy sore hips and those huge prenatal pills. Something that looks beyond all that with a Kingdom Perspective. Because without that kingdom perspective it's just too easy to get lost in a feeling, a fear, and that 'entitlement' the world wants to leave marked on our hearts and rule us by.

So baby, please please please, know how loved you truly are. Know how much you are wanted. Know how much you are adored and desired, and not just by this completely out of hand at times-bouncing off the walls-full of energy and emotions that change with the flip of a switch young and crazy family. But baby, know most of all, you are the most precious to the One Most High. Who knows your heavenly name already. Who knows exactly what He wants to put in you for His glory. Who knows what you will become and how it will hurt and humble and ultimately strengthen you along the way, and all for His glory and His Kingdom to come. If I can give you anything in this broken and lost world, it is that. A calling to be apart of His Kingdom. And I will share Him with you. You will get to taste and see that the Lord is good!

Be blessed, special little summer babe. How fun to think while I walk in the bitter cold today that the season you come in will be one entirely different. One filled with sunshine and the heat from a beautiful summer's day. Seasons come. And seasons go. I am blessed to be in this season of life. A season where His very own fruit can come from my womb.

Thank you Jesus.