Sarah Anne I Am

   Wednesday, April 15th, 2015, I woke up tired. Judah woke me at 6:30am, so I got him breakfast and started making Arthur's tea and my coffee. I halfway tidied the kitchen while I made myself toast, my eyes still heavy, thinking about the day ahead.   All week I had been praying, ever more fervently and ever more frequently, that God would bring this baby. We had an appointment for 9am on Thursday to begin naturally encouraging labor, yet I still found myself longing for something different. I desperately wanted this baby girl to come in her own timing. I wanted to know that the moment labor began was exactly the right time. So I prayed. I knew that God was powerful enough to start labor; and, slowly, I also surrendered to the fact that His plan for her birth story may be very different than my plan for her birth story   I stared at my reflection in the mirror and thought, "In the next two days you will meet your baby girl." Tears filled my eyes....

   I had big plans for this morning.    In my mind, I could see it all unfolding: Clara would go down for her first nap. Judah would settle in on the couch to watch the "Curious George Swings into Spring" for the umpteenth time. With the song "Spring brings things...dah dah dah..." buzzing endlessly in the back of my mind and slowly killing me, I would take a shower. I would finally wash my hair. I would probably even clean the toilet while I was in the bathroom without company. (Because in case you didn't know, when you're trying to pee while your baby plays in the empty bathtub and your toddler weighs himself repeatedly, you should not clean the toilet. Heaven forbid my kids get any extra ideas about putting brushes of some sort into toilets. I just bought new toothbrushes and I do NOT want them taking a swim.)   But that's not what our morning looked like. Instead, I got a bad case of mom guilt when I realized that Judah has memo...

   This past Friday I went to my parents house. I sat on the couch beside my youngest brother, my mother sitting on the floor in front of me as my kids played around her, and we watched old home videos of when I was two and half years old and my sister Anna was ten months old. I was wild and loud- standing on furniture, dancing and stomping and singing, running around and swinging toys that inevitably hit Anna in the face. The living room was littered with toys, and a basket or two of laundry sat in the corner.   It was like a photograph of my living room right now. And the kids, well, my children live from the same script- the same wild, the same loud, the same accidental injuries.   I looked at my mama and said, "No wonder I call you when it seems like no one really gets it. You get it. You've lived it."   But I think that, really, other people do understand my messy living room and how achingly exhausted I am by ten in the morning some days. But the ...