and we are led to those who help us most to grow

it appears that joseph is actually going to grow up.

i'm not sure if i really didn't think this was going to happen or if it's just hitting me with more certainty these days.

but he's going to grow up.

what's interesting about the "they grow up so fast" thing is that this is in fact a logical reality. joseph is in fact growing up. fast. nothing else in my life is as short-lived as many of joseph's developmental stages. i mean, a month - tops - he felt like a newborn. now he's seven months old. he has facial expressions. he says "va-va-va-va" with raised eyebrows and eyes squinty. he stands up holding onto the side of the laundry basket. when i rock him, a lot of the time he arches his back and stretches his neck back until i put him in his bed where he falls asleep on his own.

and the time between birth and sleeping most of the day away to needing to be rocked to sleep to doing it better by himself? seven months. seven months.

tonight jeremy put the boy in his fleece dog pajamas and when he brought him out to get me for our bedtime story, prayer, night-night daddy routine, i'm not kidding you, joseph had a look of pride on his face. he smiled in this "mom, look at my pajamas that dad and i got on me all by ourselves" way. i could have cried. in fact, i almost did, but as my eyes were starting to fill up with happy tears, jeremy looked at joseph and said "what's going on?" as in "why is mom starting to cry at the sight of you in your dog pajamas with the patch that says bow-wow and the dog faces on the footies?" so i got a hold of myself.

my friend, ann, reminded me today that the goal of parenting is to raise babies into what will eventually be adults. we want them to grow up. i mean, it would be pretty weird to not want them to grow up. this is what i have to keep in mind when i feel the "no-it's-going-too-fast-what-happened-to-your-newborn-smell" panic creeping in. because yes, joseph did start out with the best smell in the world, and yes, he is going to grow up fast. the point/challenge/please-God-help-me-to is to shepherd him during this growing up. for just a little while will it be up to me to nurture him in this way.

and yet, sweet boy, who is tonight apparently going to disprove my sappy look-at-him-all-grown-up-and-falling-asleep-on-his-own-ness, was making noises from his room and had managed to get himself all turned around in his crib when i went in to check on him right before this paragraph.

so, for now, i suppose he is still a baby. okay, good. :)

currently:

making
falafel. and tzatziki. well, i'm going to make these. for dinner tonight. it's about time. i think i started craving falafel in mid-december. i attempted to purchase falafel at a restaurant only to discover, according to our server, that it's not actually a greek food. even though i ate it in greece and have since thought that it was greek. but it's not. so, the greek restaurant on broadway, felini, does not serve falafel. just so you know. but i'm making it tonight! i'm excited. and so hungry.

praying
for the Lord to expand my horizons. i find myself so often thinking "there has to be something else i could be thinking about.." as i'm stuck in a mental rut of relational worry or confusing littleness of thought. i just want to think about bigger things. more significant things. i'm thankful that God is "not a God of confusion but of peace" (1 corinthians 14:33).

reading
a book sarah gave me for Christmas, extremely loud and incredibly close. this is the most unique book i have ever read. it's enough to make me feel crazy at times. but i'm halfway through. and i like it. i think. it's really really interesting, a story of a boy who loses his father in the september 11th attacks and goes on a quest to discover the meaning behind a key he finds in his father's closet. and more than that, but that's the concise summary. some of the pages don't even have words on them. others have pictures. it's good. i'll let you know when i'm done. because, it's 2010, and i read entire books now.

feeling
pretty relieved to not have a Christmas tree up anymore. does anyone else ever find themselves letting out a big sigh of "finally, back to normal" when the holidays are over? i took the lights off the tree, took it outside (realizing as i was just about to put my foot on the outside ground that i was not wearing shoes and snow from last night has gathered on our welcome mat), and vacuumed away the evidence. all while wearing joseph in the ergo carrier, might i add. it's nice to not have a tree in our home. mostly because jeremy and i were both allergic to it, but also because it's nice for it to be january and winter and snowing and all that those things are without Christmas. does this make me a scrooge? hope not.

enjoying
this day. it snowed so much last night. and i have really enjoyed watching the light snow be swirled over the heavier snow each time the wind blows. two cups of coffee this morning and joseph taking three naps so far haven't hurt either. i spent half of the third one resting next to him and thinking and the second half typing this entry that i began composing during the first half. oh, fractions.

hope you have a wonderful thursday.

today

sometimes when i think about my life, i feel like i'm spinning.

and when i think about the phrase "think about my life" i am reminded of my sister, megan, asking one of her middle school students to think about his life and then him actually doing it and the face megan makes imitating what a middle schooler thinking about his life looks like.

the other night, i was making a grocery list, and i looked over to see joseph rolling to get to a stack of books and his carseat. i instinctively said "joooseph" and as the word came out of my mouth, i had to say it again, marvelling at the fact that the little baby rolling around (we've gone mobile, people) is my son and his name is joseph.

i remember my friend, jess, saying that she tried really hard to cherish specific moments with her son, finn, and i've found myself doing the same thing at times with j.bourne. following last night's dinner, jeremy, joseph, and i played with his infant-sized royals hat for about twenty minutes. it was so wonderful. i think that after a whole day with the babe, sometimes i figure time with dad and only dad is a must for both of us, but i realized in the twenty minutes of hat-on-dad, hat-on-joseph, hat-on-mom, peek-a-boo, repeat that it's pretty fun for the three of us to hang out too.

today's goal and prayer is to spend today joyfully and not at any point have the "ahhh... why did i go on facebook??" feeling. so far so good. i woke up at 6:45 to little boy making happy noises, enjoyed a cup of coffee after fasting from coffee and sugar yesterday (didn't realize i was that addicted..), played a bit, ironed a shirt, put the boy down for his first nap, started some diaper laundry, read john 8:1-11 (um, amazing), folded laundry, played some more with sweet boy, put him down for nap number 2, took a shower, and well.. here i am.

we're running low on v5's and burt's bees. at the same time. it's a tough life i lead. i intend to fix this very soon.

i'm working on new year's resolutions. thus far, i resolve to eliminate hurry, read complete books, and make an intentional list of crafts that i want to do and do them. i should probably stop there, now that i read the growing list. oh, and i'm going to try to write here more often. maybe every week if you're lucky.

i think i just realized that i have ended my type two spaces after a period habit. thank you very much, jeremy. it feels good.

i'm hearing some awake noises from the other room.. i love this life. have i said that?

i had a dream last night that jeremy, joseph, and i were on the run. i'm not really sure why, but i think it had something to do with the protestant reformation. i do know that at one point in the dream, jeremy discarded joseph's carseat off the side of a mountain, said we wouldn't need it anymore where we were going, and for the rest of the dream had joseph on his back in the moby wrap. we ended up in colorado.

joseph had 5, count 'em, 5 dirty diapers this morning. like before noon. seriously. three were poopy. annnnd they were all cloth diapers! it's working out pretty well so far. my studfest husband installed a sprayer that's attached to our toilet to wash them off. and it feels good to not be throwing something away each time the little kicky boy is up on the changing table. okay, i promise.. that's the last i talk about the diapers. it's just that lately when people ask me how i'm doing/what's going on with me, i'm really tempted to tell them about cloth diapers. sometimes i give in. they're just really cute and really cheap (in the long run, of course), and just so environmentally friendly. okay, now that was officially the last time i talk about the diapers.

in other news, i added some super masculine decor to jbl's nursery. he's been taking naps in there, so i figured some manliness could help out that effort a bit. he now has a wall that is adorned by a clothesline (i love clothesline decor. a lot.) his royals hat, a royals world series championship penant, some blue baby shoes, and a movie poster from the bourne ultimatum. in this poster, jason bourne may or may not be carrying a pretty dangerous looking gun. we'll just have to explain it to joseph when he's older. i wonder how it will go explaining his middle name to him when he's not old enough to see any of the movies yet..

yes. yes, my life does in fact revolve around my son.