the baby diaries. 7wks: the bobble head

hand development in week 7

Hands are developing at an amazing speed this week! Day 48

And this is the hand only 3 days later
foot development in week 7 & 8

Your baby's feet are developing at an amazing speed as well. (Day 51)

And this is the foot in week 8 (Day 60)

the baby diaries. 6wks: the baked bean

this week has been yuck. latham took me out for tea after watching a movie that made me cry. (i do not recomend sucker punch)
tea was awesome though. according to latham i am charged with the duty of picking where we go for meals for the next 9 months as i have to be able to eat it and stomach it etc. fair enough i suppose.

and today the morning sickness starts. lets try crackers. my iceblock solution was holding off the nausea untill thismorning. now i just feel like having a vom every 5 minutes. racing down the stairs is an interesting challenge. And my mummy is at work so I can't ring her to ask what is good to eat! she had hyperemesis with me so she should know

and now a word from the sarcastic journalist:

There is a group of women out there that think they didn’t get morning sickness because they wouldn’t allow themselves to. Like, they think throwing up all day, every day is a state of mind.

“Oh, I just wouldn’t allow myself to throw up,” she says while rubbing her nonexistent belly. “So I didn’t.”
Any pregnant woman that comes across these types of women should turn the other way and run as fast as she can (which might just be lumbering gently away). Why? This woman has the “Miracle of Life Syndrome.”
Every little gas pain and tummy rumble is special. They feel like they’re “glowing” and just love every last bit of pregnancy, right down to the hemorrhoids.
You do not want to be friends with these women. They will brag about “easy” labors. Their babies will sleep through the night by the end of the first week.
Worst of all? She’ll be fitting into her “skinny jeans” by her six week postpartum checkup. Never trust a woman that can fit into her skinny jeans that quickly.
Find yourself someone with hyperemesis. She won’t ask if you “tried crackers.” She’ll be truthful about labor and will be your friend in sweatpants for that first year after the baby.Never underestimate the value of a friendship where you can go grocery shopping together in your pajamas.

The baby diaries. 5wks: mini manatee

The Baby Diaries. 4wks: The rasin.

So this week we told a lot of people that we were expecting. The pregnancy symptoms are starting to rear their ugly head. Tired all the time and slightly queezy although not too bad. At the moment my sense of smell would put a canine to shame. As a downside I now cannot stand the smell of mince or my bakingsoda spray n wipe. I also hate the taste of toothpaste yet am driven by an overwhelming desire to brush my teeth a lot. Cramping still hasn't stopped. Blast. My dad told my uncle who can't keep his mouth shut and subsequently started a roumor i was pregnant around church in dunedin this week. Good one! Obviously either dad failed to relay the "we are keeping it quiet" message or Uncle didn't stop to think about what the consequences of telling everyone would be should I happen to miscarry. Having someone I didn't really know come up to me 3 months after a miscarry and ask how my wee baby was coming along would break my heart. A miscarriage is not really the sort of this you broadcast to a wide audience so some people we may not have realised knew about the pregnancy would miss the misscarriage news. A tad awkward for them should they just be trying to be nice and make conversation. Cummon 13 weeks! Hurry up! Get me out of this silly danger zone!

The baby diaries. 3wks: the sesamea seed

So on friday I started having cramps. Oh joy that time of month. Only 'that time of month' seemed to forget its primary role was infact bleeding and not just painful cramping. After 4 days of waiting I got fed up and peed on a stick. Was that a second blue line or was I just imagining it? So on wednesday (shopping day) we picked up another pregnancy test and, with the utmost of slyness, hid it in our trolley. Ever feel like you get silently judged by what you have in your trolley at the supermarket? Yeah this was one of those days...

Now morning pee is meant to be high in hcg so on thursday I woke up early to take a test. Yep two blue lines it was. My oh so cool about it husband who had said to me "we have nothing to be worried about" when I told him we might be pregnant first time now text me from work saying "ok now im experiencing a wave of different emotions. At first i could wave it off as unknown... not anymore. love you!"

So now the nerves begin. What about this glorious dream of traveling? What have I done to it? It looks like all those months of randomly gathering mental info on pregnancy and birth was cleverly orchestrated. I had no reason to be looking up that info. God knows what he was doing.

I now have a lovely team of three ladies that are going to come see me as my midwives. How lucky am I to have such an awesome group of ladies at church who can direct me to midwives such as this.

My husband is now asking the hard questions. Do I want to move house to rent or do we want to think about buying now that we wont be going overseas for a while? Cloth nappies or disposable? Two kids close together or far apart? The one thing I know for sure is the one thing that doesn't always turn out how you plan and that is how I want the birth to be. Try to eat healthy and not use any type of drugs or pain releif. Mad! I'm only 5 weeks in and already the pain is rediculous. I bet I will come to the birth and be begging for this meagre pain back.
Next stop: finding antenatal classes to attend and trying to keep it a secret. Well... secret apart from those we have already told. I had a primal urge to tell my mother, so now the whole immediate family knows. Soon best friends and extended family will know and then at 13 weeks you will all be able to read these updates!

So I am 5 weeks (or 3 weeks from conception) into this pregnancy and that means my baby is the size of a sesamea seed and in a few days will have its own heat beat. Can you believe it? Try to veiw a heart in a sesamea seed. Tiny eh! Only now do I truly understand king Davids words.

Psalm 139  

¹³ For you created my inmost being;
   you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
¹⁴ I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
   your works are wonderful,
   I know that full well.
¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you
   when I was made in the secret place,
   when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
¹⁶ Your eyes saw my unformed body;
   all the days ordained for me were written in your book
   before one of them came to be.
¹⁷ How precious to me are your thoughts, God!
   How vast is the sum of them!
¹⁸ Were I to count them,
   they would outnumber the grains of sand—
   when I awake, I am still with you.

Nature vs Nurture

While helping with a BBQ at a local primary school this week I happened to overhear the water truck driver talking to a woman about the earthquake.

"That's the thing about natural disasters. It brings out the best in people and it brings out the worst in people"

I was pondering this on the bike home while trying not to breathe through my nose. Does it bring out the best and the worst in people? Or does it simply bring out the people?
The theory that people are either innately bad or innately good is one of major controversy and as a christian, I do believe everyone is capable of change. What must've happened to the young boy that grew up to become a man that gets arrested for looting? Abusive parents? Lack of education and proper role models? Got in with the wrong crowd?
Who is to blame, not for his own actions (they are just that, his own) but rather for the life leading up to that point that somehow made him think his actions were OK or necessary?

If there was a seed and it fell from the tree onto cold, hard ground and as a result grew up stunted and never bore much fruit, is that the fault of the tree? If that same seed was picked up by a human who planted it in rich soil with plenty of water and sunlight and the seed still grew up to be stunted with little fruit, is that the fault of the grower?

There is one thing missing from this metaphor. The tree is not human.
If the seed fell from the tree onto cold hard ground because the tree simply did not care where its offspring landed then that is the fault of the tree. If there was nothing but cold hard ground as far as the eye could see then circumstances out of the trees control would be to blame, but that doesn't mean the tree loved her offspring any less. However upon hitting the cold hard ground, the offspring may come to believe that the tree did not love it. It is only a seed and cannot see as far as the tree. Its only option is to see a huge tree above it that is thriving enough to produce fruit (and therefore seeds) and wonder why then did the tree drop it near its base where the ground is hard? OK this is doing my head in. Lets just change back to human and child.

I will use my own upbringing as an example because upon reading over that last paragraph I think I am living up to the old adage "you can tell more about the writer from his works than what he is actually writing about"

My fathers tree was a big fat over indulged woman that was thrown far away from her tree as a kid when she fell pregnant. Having to adopt out this seed started killing dads tree from the inside out until she was old and bitter and reluctant to ever let any of her seeds go again. As a result they were dropped on hard ground right at the base of their tree where all the nutrients and moisture had been taken by the tree. Being stubborn or perhaps just lucky, all four seeds found root but the roots were shallow. My dad and his sister grew up hating the tree for not letting them fall away from her where the ground was richer and she wasn't blocking the sunlight. The other two seeds listened to the tree when she told them of the bleakness of the world she had grown up in and they grew to fear doing anything without her permission. Being a mother she wanted the best for her children but she was smothering them. She forced living water down their throats until they grew big and fat but learned to hate the taste. My father managed to uproot himself and found himself planted by another tree that had grown up with many siblings and had only recently discovered the benefits of drinking living water. Now away from that horrid mother tree, dad decided never to drink living water again. He would prep his leaves just so, so that it appeared he was, but the water he was drinking was tainted with hatred for the tree that tried to manipulate him and he never grew much fruit. My mother, being a timid tree, tried to ask him about the water he was drinking but was told "you're exactly like my mother!" She ended up believing that changing herself was the answer so she stopped having an opinion. Then came the day that she found she was growing a seed. She was thrilled! But dad, fearing a childhood he had experienced, said he wasn't ready to be a father. He had no role model as his father tree had been absent a lot. Determined that his sapling would not have an upbringing like his, dad taught the sapling the hard realities of the world. That women manipulated and fathers never showed affection if they were there at all. The sapling was under explicit instructions that it must live the life her parents never got to live. Living water was OK in small doses but getting good grades came first. If rules weren't adhered to then a sound lashing was in order. The sapling learned to fear her father and despise her mother for not standing up to him. Then one day her mother took her and her siblings and left. The sapling now had broken roots and was in terrible pain so blamed her mother. The mother tree was taken aback when the scars on her saplings trunks did not start to heal as she had expected. She went into a great depression. It was now up to the learned older sapling to try and nurture her two siblings the only way she had been taught how. One sibling grew up despising her for smothering. The other grew up thinking that her sister was mean and fearing the world.

The end result was a woman who always thought the worst of men even though she longed to actually be close to one. She learned not to have an opinion in order to keep herself safe.Then she met a man who reintroduced her to living water. It began to heal the scars on her trunk and made her see clearer. She realised that not every guy was bad although beginning to trust them again was an ongoing journey. She started to have a little faith in herself. She married the tree of her dreams and is happy but still afraid of producing fruit.

There is something to be said for nature, like the short gene in my family and the high risk of diabetes but everything to do with our actions is defined by how we were nurtured. But let us not forget that living water. It has the ability to change any tree from the inside out. It is the only thing that can nurture us properly. It was specifically designed for us and we cannot function as fruit bearing trees without it.
Being like my parents and habouring bitterness may give us the appearance of trees ready to have fruit but untill you have living water in the equation the fruit will not grow properly. That, we cannot blame on nature. It is simply a nurture we did not acknowledge as our own fault.

Matthew 7:15-20 

15 "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.  16 You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles?  17 So, every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears evil fruit.  18 A sound tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.  19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus you will know them by their fruits.

Matthew 21:18-19

¹⁸ Early in the morning, as Jesus was on his way back to the city, he was hungry. ¹⁹ Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Fig trees grow fruit even before the leaves grow therefore there should have been figs on the tree. Then he said to it, “May you never bear fruit again!” Immediately the tree withered. Basically this was an illustration to his disciples not to do what my dad did and pretend to be a christian without producing fruit.

SO was it nature that made that man loot? Perhaps. But it is nurturing that decides your nature. However you do not have to accept a bad nature just because it was the way you were raised. Nor should you use your upbringing as an excuse for bad deeds when you are no longer a child and can figure out for yourself that you should know better and can control your own actions. God is able to do an amazing work in you and help you become the person he created you to be when your seed was just taking root.

Compassion equals total lack of greed.

The recent terrorist bombings in Moscow got me in a pretty foul mood. What possible purpose do they think this will accomplish? The Qur'an and most other religious texts teach of life being sacred and to embrace peace. To me terrorism is the opposite of these things, so how can a man become so deluded that he thinks he is fighting for God when he is the embodiment of everything God stands against?
I had the gall to spurt my frustration over facebook and was given a swift lesson in compassion. I ended up thinking back to a sermon quote I had heard "I never met a person who didn't matter to God"
If God loves all of us equally then who am I to think that all terrorists are spawn of Satan and deserve the eternity they have set themselves on? As a christian my mindset should be one of "everyone has the opportunity to change" and "Satan is the enemy not the people he has deceived".
Isn't Satan malicious? Using religion as the vehicle through which he turns Gods people against each other? To fight him we have to change our pattern of behaviour from hating those who oppose us ( which is our natural response) and actually do what God commands, which is love your enemies and do good to those that wrong you. If everyone cared as much for the stranger sitting beside them as they did for themselves then the world would be perfect.
I believe greed is the primary reason that the world is drowning in crap. I must have more! so I will start a war; drain the earth of its resources without a thought for future consequences; murder someone for a fleeting trinket, abort my baby because to me it is an inconvenience rather than a blessing given by God; kill animals for their skin without thought for the companionship that God created them for; ignore the starving masses letting cows and rats roam the street and destroy 30% of the grain that would feed the entire poor populace of India twice over; refuse to send cheap drugs to Africa that would prevent babies being born with aids passed on from their mothers because I want to live in a mansion not a regular house; get into a position of power in a country not for the people in the country but to line my pockets for the term I am elected; keep the most precious gift we have been given, that never runs out and never diminishes no matter how many times you share it, from people around us because we care more about our self image than we do about the eternity of our friends...
Yes we must tell people the gospel (literal translation: the good news) but we must also live the gospel which is that Christ died for ALL of us. This includes terrorists, your best friend, the murderer with the abusive upbringing who is rotting in jail and your own children. If we are to be Christians we must believe this and in believing this we must also love everyone. The 10 commandments are summed up with just two: Love God with everything you are and love your neighbour as you love yourself.

1 John 4:8

God Is Love

 ^7-10My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn't know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can't know him if you don't love. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they've done to our relationship with God. 

So what are we going to do about it? I believe if you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem. Just as not saying anything when the truth is needed is still lying, not doing anything when the world is dying is batting for the wrong team.

 ¹⁴ What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? ¹⁵ Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. ¹⁶ If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? ¹⁷ In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. -James 2  

Mother Teresa once paraphrased Jesus saying, "At the end of our lives, we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made or how many great things we have done. We will be judged by ‘I was hungry and you gave me food  to eat. I was naked and you clothed me. I was homeless and you took me in’. This is Christ in disguise.'"

Being Christ to the world means not being greedy. This is now my daily challenge. For a good example of how good deeds work I would suggest watching the movie 'Pay it forward.' 


Cook someone a meal. Give those clothes you never wear away to the salvation army. Give regularly to a charity. Sponsor a child. Offer to clean someones house for them. 


To sum up. Just be a good friend. We have the best friend we could ever ask for. Why not follow his example and share him with the world?

Respecting Weakness

Freedom Camping. Basically this is making a choice to go somewhere that has little to no modern conveniences and actually enjoying yourself. I had my first experience freedom camping over new years. Never before have I been in a tent when it rained so hard; reacted quite so much to sand fly bites; enjoyed myself so thoroughly around a camp fire; actually had a campfire. It was quite something.

So. What did I learn from it? How to relax maybe. But mainly conflict resolution. The actual conflict happened before we went away. Both my husband and one of my best friends have oldest child tendencies. Not just that but they are both "aggressive firstborns". When it came to organisation they both knew exactly what they wanted and it was not the same thing.

The seeming disagreement was over whether or not to take a wash up basin. It sounded silly to me, both now and at the time, however I figured it was just a scapegoat for an underlying issue. In typical "compliant firstborn" style I tried to mediate and offer a temporary solution. The girls would organise the food and homey touches. The boys could organise travel and where to camp and all the functional things. It didn't fix the problem but it was enough to get one firstborn out of the house to go play snooker while me and the other did our girl thing and sorted out food. It didnt however prevent a last "don't let things get excessive" speech before his departure.

I had originally hoped to confront the situation when my husband returned but I decided to let him look at the list and hopefully he would agree it was reasonable and I could get on and enjoy the weekend.
Alas it was not to be. He was force fed our list and told it was non negotiable. Having his input and control taken away was enough to put him over the edge no matter how reasonable the list. He graciously held back until the other half of our camping party had left.

He made a valid point during his tirade. "A man will bend over backwards for only two people. His mother, and any girl under the age of 10. Anyone else has to earn his respect". Unfortunately my friend was neither his mother nor a preadolescent girl. Even though she was engaged to his older brother, in his mind she had simply come into his family and decreed how things were to be done without even attempting to be sympathetic to the family etiquette, so his respect meter was plummeting towards zero. And with that my list was slapped forcefully down on my leg. Suddenly I flipped back to life-before-the-divorce mode. I tuned out to the fact he was ranting about something totally unrelated to me. I simply saw anger aimed at me and took it personally. I froze and when the dialogue stopped I quickly excused myself from the room before any weakness could be shown. I came out of my haze to find myself sitting in the hallway with his mother giving me a hug.

When He had cooled off he came out to see where I had run off too. This was not in keeping with my traditional conflict resolution protocol when growing up, which involved washing my face in cold water and returning to the room like nothing had happened. It seems my husband it not a fan of rugs and the stuff that is under them. He responded to the situation in true top-layer-only style. "I'm sorry for hating on your friend". I told him I didn't care how much he got angry with my friends as long as it wasn't me he took it out on and that I no longer wanted to go camping for fear of walking on eggshells all weekend. I wanted to enjoy myself not be constantly wary of a potential explosion that would involve me haing to take sides.
He explained how he felt re being told he had no say in his own house and that I hadn't defended him. I explained that I never used to have to defend him as he was always the laid back, go-with-the-flow one out of the two of us. Maybe I should have taken his side because even if his point about not taking the wash basin was not really something I agreed with, his underlying need to be respected in his own house was something I think he had every right to expect.
He agreed that for the weekend he would suck it up and let me enjoy myself. Once a situation calms down its easier to see that small things are not the real reason for some arguments and perhaps weren't worth getting worked up about. But in the end I am glad we had the talk even if it took me realising I still have issues with my father and freaking out to make it happen.

I have learnt the difference between staying quiet out of fear and staying quiet out of respect for my husband. This verse has, to me, always meant "women are inferior and God is happy if you just keep your mouth shut and do what you're told". But now I know that it means live in such a way that you are a positive influence on your husband. Don't just be a door mat but rather be the servant heart that all christians are called to be. And never forget that you have the exact same value as your husband in God's eyes and that you should be treated with respect by your husband.

1 Peter 3

Wives and Husbands

 ¹ In the same way, you wives should yield to your husbands. Then, if some husbands do not obey God's teaching, they will be persuaded to believe without anyone's saying a word to them. They will be persuaded by the way their wives live.² Your husbands will see the pure lives you live with your respect for God.³ It is not fancy hair, gold jewelry, or fine clothes that should make you beautiful.⁴ No, your beauty should come from within you—the beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit that will never be destroyed and is very precious to God.⁵ In this same way the holy women who lived long ago and followed God made themselves beautiful, yielding to their own husbands.⁶ Sarah obeyed Abraham, her husband, and called him her master. And you women are true children of Sarah if you always do what is right and are not afraid.

 ⁷ In the same way, you husbands should live with your wives in an understanding way, since they are weaker than you. Show them respect, because God gives them the same blessing he gives you—the grace that gives true life. Do this so that nothing will stop your prayers.