So today it’s FREEZING in Minnesota. I have my bible study this morning, and as I took Grant out of the car to take him in I realized how cold it was, and how underdressed he was for the weather.
(I suck at dressing him according to the temps)
The wind picked up and hit me in the face. It was a cold, cold wind, and usually every time the wind hits me in the face I’m reminded of walking to my Dad’s office. I was a Daddy’s girl and usually the two hours between coming home from school and seeing him were too much to stand so I would walk over to hang out with him. As soon as I hit the gravel road, the wind would really pick up and knock the wind out of me, because of the wind tunnel the buildings made. I remember all the seasons of being little by that alley in the road, and by what my Dad and the other farmers were doing. This time of year, the dryers were going, the trucks were bringing corn. So my Dad was either unloading trucks, or weighing them. (This means staying off the scale when you walked in, or you’d get in trouble and that meant no candy bars and pop)
But for the first time in a really long time, when the wind hit me in the face I didn’t remember that. I remembered instead running to the hospital on my lunch break, getting my blood tested for a little Feebus. And that just brought back everything….
On the weekend of October 30th, last year I decided to smoke my last cigarette. I know now my body recognized a two-week-old little baby growing inside of me, but I thought the urge to quit was weird. However I went with it, and chewed A LOT of the gum. We went to a wedding in Stillwater that Saturday and I drank a LOT of beer, but didn’t really get drunk. I thought that was weird too, but know now that was my body protecting that little baby. So I went home that night and the pregnancy test I had taken, it looked positive. I told myself I was seeing things and went to bed. Then when I got up the next morning, I noticed it REALLY DID look positive. The boy looks and says it’s sat too long, so after church we stop and I get another test.
I took it and it came back positive. I yelled for the boy, and I will NEVER forget the look on his face. He said, “I’m going to get some more.” I took one two hours later, another two hours later, and another two hours later. By this time it’s obvious that they are positive and we’re not messing around here. That night we went to Totino’s and had pasta, and was so excited. The weekend before this we’d been at a meeting at an adoption agency, and were planning on heading to Vietnam to get a little one. Our joy was there, and we had bought books and filled out TONS of paperwork in anticipation of this journey. Now we were looking at something completely different. We went to the doctor and she confirmed I was, and said that I needed to have an ultrasound to verify things since they had told us we couldn’t have babies, just to be sure everything was okay.
That ultrasound they couldn’t find the Feebus, and told me to go and have my blood drawn over three days to make sure my HCG levels were rising. If I was pregnant I was earlier than 8 weeks, and they wanted to be sure. So I got to go to the hospital on my lunch breaks, and get my blood drawn and anxiously wait for them to call me with the results. By the third draw it was confirmed I was pregnant but only three weeks, and that’s why they couldn’t see anything.
When I felt the wind hit me this morning, I remembered walking over to Saint Joe’s and all the feelings I felt. I remember the joy at the little life inside me, the fear of losing that, the way that downtown Saint Paul smelled, the way I’d walk to work every morning. The way this little person drained my energy while his body was being created inside mine. It’s all SO vivid to me still, and I just wanted to cry this morning as I held Grant in the car seat and walked into church.
God answers prayers. Here I was with my beautiful baby, walking into a church of people whom are guiding me to the life I want to lead, and I just was so grateful in the moment. It’s just a miracle to me. Those first few weeks Grant grew into our lives, was so much more than gaining a baby. We were gaining God’s influence back into our lives, and a hope and a joy that hasn’t gone away.
Today I brought Grant down to the nursery, changed him, held him and put him in the swing and walked away. I was nervous, as there were a lot of kids today, and I didn’t want to leave him at all. When I came back he looked at me and cried and cried which tells me that he loves me still, he cries to yell at me for leaving, but he ate a bottle while I was gone and I just realized how different my life is. How completely shifted my world is, tilted to a different axis someone said today. God answers prayers. Yay for that. ☺
