Fertility...Not so cut and dry

My second son turned nine this month and while celebrating his birthday I was reminded of the story of his conception.

After Jeff and I had been married for five years, we decided to start trying for children.  I had always heard it might take awhile to get pregnant.  A friend at work gave me a gestational wheel that showed ovulation dates and the best times to conceive. (Jeff said it sounded like a game show!)  Well, I followed it precisely and got pregnant the first month we tried! Easy peasy...

After a few years we desired to try for another child.  I always wanted a girl and had read a book about choosing the sex of your child by timing relations during certain parts of your ovulation cycle.  I tried it for a few months, but I didn't get pregnant.  So, I threw out the book idea and went back to the wheel.  Still nothing. I began charting my cycle, counting the days, CM, the whole thing, yet still nothing.

I was beginning to feel my body had betrayed me.  I had gotten pregnant before, why not now?  My emotions were all over the map.  One month, I was so confident that everything had been timed correctly and I was late.  I just knew I was pregnant.  I was about to leave to attend a bible study at church when I started my cycle.  I broke down and cried.  Jeff tried to comfort me, but I just sobbed as I got in the car to head to the church.

I was just driving and thinking when, out of the blue, I heard a voice on the inside that said, "Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart."  It hit me like a rock.  I was consumed with "my plan" and "my charts" and wasn't relying on the Lord.  I clicked on the CD player and put on worship music.  I made a choice to praise him through my disappointment and tears.  I didn't feel like it, but I did it and it completely changed my outlook.

Guess what?  I got pregnant that very next month, about a year after first trying!

God is faithful to us when we ask him for help and make a decision to delight ourself in Him.

Here's my blessing.  He is one of the kindest, most joyful, silly boys I know.  Love him to pieces!

I love the Amplified version of Psalms 37:4,  "Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He will give you the desires and secret petitions of your heart."

Just one of those days...

Have you ever just had one of those days? I felt like I was behind before I even got out of bed.  Over lunchtime, I was listening to a nationwide blog radio program by Leigh Bortins, the founder of Classical Conversations.  She was talking about the standardized testing coming up and some of my parents had questions about the test.  I posted a question in the chat box.  She answered the question and I replied my thanks.  I thought I would add a smiley face in my response, since I had seen others use them in their posts and thought they were cute.  I clicked on the smiley face icon and the box came up with several to choose from.  There were a lot of animated ones, so I chose one in the upper left hand corner that looked like a basic smiley face and clicked send.  When my post showed up, I noticed there were two animated smiley faces and the right one was kissing the left one.  Egad!!   I was sitting at my computer completely mortified!  I was trying to figure out how to delete it, but to no avail.  It just kept staring at me, scooting over to kiss the other smiley face and then glowing with hearts, again and again - stop it!  Oh, humbling moments...

The rest of my day was less eventful.  I rounded it out by cleaning out my refrigerator BEFORE the trash service arrived.  I've been married almost 20 years and I think that has happened maybe 4 times.
I took out each drawer and shelf and gave them a good cleaning.  It looks so wonderful!  I do indeed love a clean refrigerator.

Speaking of clean, I was completely bummed when our 1 year old dishwasher stopped getting our dishes clean and left a white film on our glasses.  We use it so much we even splurged for a nicer one, so this was very disappointing.  We tried LemiShine, all the rinse aids, and I even took the racks out and washed everything down. We were hand washing the dishes!  Then we came across these little babies

They work amazingly well!  Now my glasses look brand new!!  This makes mama very happy!

Ah, now I'm gonna sit here and finish up American Tail with my kiddos.

Happy Wednesday everyone!