Pregnancy Update

Last month we had THE sonogram and found out we're having a girl!  Now everyone tells us that we're just like the Brady Bunch.  I am always quick to remind them that we don't have an Alice.  I tell you, none of us appreciated Alice as we should have.  We just thought she was comic relief, but can you imagine that Carol would have never had time to sit at the little orange dinette sipping coffee if it weren't for Alice working up the "Pork Chops and Appleshauce" in the kitchen.  Alice was the glue that held it all together.

We are usually pretty quick about coming up with a name for our new babes, but we're struggling this time around.  At first we thought Claudia.  It sounds so pretty, but it means "lame!"  We cannot call our daughter Lame!  It would be very 80's of Darin and me, but no, we just can't bring ourselves to do it. 

Darin's latest thing has been Grace Anne.  Love Grace.  I'm all for it.  But as I told him while we were driving to a "Meet the THESA Riders" (football) event, we did not have a relative with the name Anne.  It's been our custom to choose a middle name from a member of the family.  We've been alternating families, and it's my family's turn.  I was chatting with my Mom on the phone and my sister-in-law Shirley was there and they were asking about a name for this poor baby.  Shirley recommended Shirley Jackie (Jackie is my Mom's name) or Jackie Shirley.  hahaha.  We got a good laugh from that.  

So as we were driving along to meet the THESA Riders, I told Darin about the Shirley Jackie/Jackie Shirley thing.  hahahaha  Another good laugh.  Then we started brainstorming about a middle name again, but Darin could not budge from Anne.  He was refusing.  I tried my sister's name....Patricia.  No.  He didn't like that with Grace....Lynn.  My sister's middle name.  No.  That sounded too much like Graceland when said together. sigh.  We've already used a variation of my Mom's middle name for a middle name and that left only my sister!  We are overrun with boys/men in my family.  But then Darin came up with a great idea.  He said, "I'll bet Shirley's middle name is Anne."

Give me a break.  What were the odds going to be that Shirley's middle name is Anne?  I swore it couldn't be and Darin swore it could be.  So I grabbed my cell phone and called my bro and Shirley right away.  My brother, Jim, answered and I asked him what Shirley's middle name is. 

IT'S ANN!

Speechless!  We couldn't believe it!  What were the odds of that????  LoL!  So we definitely have a middle name for this child, but Darin says he's not going to commit to Grace just yet.  sigh.  I like to make decisions a little quicker than he does.  ;-)   

So...other than all this naming drama, everything seems to be going well!  24 weeks and counting.

Home Making

We are well into our busy season and Darin and I are counting down the days until November.  ;-)  We are homebodies deep down and all the going is really stretching us!  It's funny...in high school and college I was always extremely busy.  I was one of those girls who was too busy to do much dating.  I loved it.  It was easy to juggle everything since I was a single gal.  Now that we have five kids and one on the way, I've had to readjust my mental frame of mind to realize that it's okay to not be so busy with outside activities because I have replaced the outside stuff with my children, husband, homeschooling and housework.  It's really sad to me to hear other mothers denigrate the importance of what there is to be done at home in favor of outside activities.

I love what J.R. Miller wrote in Home-Making:
"We are fast moving on through this world.  Soon all that will remain of us will be the memories of our lives.  No part of our work will then afford such a true test of our living as the memorials we leave behind us in our homes.  No other work that God gives any of us to do is so important, so sacred, so far-reaching in its influence, so delicate and easily  marred as our home-making.  This is the work of all our life that is most divine.  The carpenter works in wood, the mason works in stone, the smith works in iron, the artist works on canvas, but the home-maker works on immortal lives.  The wood or the stone or the iron or the canvas may be marred, and it will not matter greatly in fifty years; but let a tender human soul be marred in its early training, and ages hence the effects will still be seen.  whatever else we slight, let it never be our home-making.  If we do nothing else well in this world, let us at least build well within our own doors."