Easter

Haven't had much time to blog lately with tons of wonderful company, but I thought I should at least post a few pics of Easter! It was such a blessing to have my parents here for Easter. So fun to see their relationship with Lilia build. They have all kinds of fun together! And this year we started what is certain to become a family tradition -- the egg hunt at Schnepf Farms. Such a great experience!

Other fun stuff: Lilia is having a "communication explosion." She is saying and signing things we've never seen her do before! It's so wonderful to see her delight when she asks for something and gets it -- the joy of communication! She's saying and signing up, down, grandpa, tree, leaf, "Baby Signing Time," banana, eat, milk, water, thank you, and many more things. It's really a blast.

Exhaustion, Rest and Strategizing

First -- Who needs a thesaurus? I do! I do! Count how many times I used the word "crazy" in my last post for bonus points....

Second -- The reason I used "crazy" so many times is that life with an infant is just that. Insane, out-of-hand, daft, delirious, ape, nutty, unbalanced and all the other synonyms I can find via Google. It's also extremely gratifying (delightful, enjoyable, pleasant, pleasing.... oh wait, I've gone too far.). It's so strange to imagine that this person did not exist in the world before and that I am influencing her every day. That she loves me even though she can't tell me yet and that I love her more than I ever thought I could love anyone are concepts I haven't begun to grasp. Profound doesn't begin to cover the reality of building a family with someone.

But back to crazy. It is so very easy to lose oneself and one's marriage in the fray when there's a baby involved. You're living from feeding to feeding, diaper to diaper and not sleeping enough. Add to that we've been painting and unpacking and you have a life on the edge of sanity. So you can imagine our glee when my parents offered to take the baby overnight so that we could have a little getaway. It was incredible! First we saw the movie "Julie and Julia" (very good, very us), and then we stayed at the glorious Intercontinental Montelucia Resort for a song off of Hotwire. It was the most romantic, totally luxurious hotel I've ever been to and that 24 hours was like water for our souls. We totally unwound.

We also realized that we need to do a better job of taking care of ourselves on a regular basis. First order of business? Food. No more eating haphazardly. We decided to trade off nights and actually make ourselves a good dinner. That has been lovely. We also decided to have people over every other Sunday for dinner and have a date night on the opposite Sunday. Here's hoping that we can not just survive this period but really drink in every moment of it!

A Study in Contrasts

So tonight my brain is in three places.

1. I'm currently watching a FABULOUS episode of the Colbert Report. He's in Iraq. It's freaking hilarious. I particularly like his logo, which includes the word "veritasiness."

2. I'm rereading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, which is as wonderful as the first time I read it. If you haven't had the pleasure of reading this engaging series, allow me to be the 457th person to recommend it to you....

3. I'm getting extremely excited about Monvee. Most of you who know is know that Jeff and I LOVE John Ortberg. We often joke about calling him on the phone and asking him to mentor us. If you haven't read any of his books, we highly recommend them. Particularly The Life You've Always Wanted. Anyway, I think Monvee is turning out to be the closest one can get to being personally mentored by Ortberg. I'm working with the leadership team at our church on spiritual formation and I'm recommending this program! I would love to know what you all think.

3 Wishes

1. I wish I had taken these pictures, but I have to give credit on that to the amazing Miss Jaime, who has heard my plea for better pictures of my beautiful baby! These are from our short afternoon at her house last Sunday. It was lovely. THANK YOU, JAIME! We will treasure these forever. And they will close out the "month 4" album, as Miss Lilia started her fifth month today. It's so hard to believe.

2. I wish I were related to C.S. Lewis. No, seriously. I'm reading a book of his essays and I'm totally astounded. He has a way of pinpointing ideas and the thoughts behind them that is so... piercing. It's actually not his clarity of thought that I admire so much as his clarity of heart, though. Here was a man who lived in an ivory tower but showered money and time and other blessings on the rest of us. He gave and gave and gave although his poor bookkeeping skills led him to believe he was nearly impoverished most of the time. He prayed that God would take his wife's pain and give it to him instead. He wrote back to everyone. He paid for a single mother's boys to go to private school. The examples of his kindness and generosity are endless, but you won't find a single one in his own work -- others tell the stories.

Most of you know that Lilia's middle name (Joy) is a tribute to Lewis. Jeff and I have read, discussed and traded C.S. Lewis books for more than a decade and they still challenge us to examine ourselves more closely and love others more deeply. So, here's to Jack. Wish I could've shaken his hand.

3. I wish I had some sort of personal central air conditioning system so I was immune to this heat. That's right kids, it's getting hot. 100-105 hot, which in Phoenix is a temperature accompanied by a certain sense of internal dread. Summer is coming. Summer. Is coming. Cue slow drum beat.

I was going to use my final wish to wish for October due to the weather, but I would never wish away those months with my beautiful baby girl (see wish #1 for evidence). So I guess it's not all that bad, is it? ;)

Updates, and The Roof is On Fire!

This is one of those random blog posts with unrelated items.

1. Update on home purchase: We have our inspection this morning at 9. We would really appreciate prayer that no "deal killers" are found in the inspection and that the inspector finds everything! Thank you.

2. I pumped yesterday and Jeff took the baby all night last night while I slept on the couch. It was glorious. I got up at about 4:30 wondering why the sun wasn't up. We decided to try this over Mother's Day weekend: Jeff will sleep on the couch on Thursday nights (midway through his workweek) and I will do so on Sunday nights (midway through his weekend). That way we can both get some good sleep in. I look forward to hearing how their night was, but it sounded to me like there were no horribly long crying spurts so that's a good thing! Trial and error, trial and error, trial and error. That appears to be the pattern of parenting. Dan, you're right about the communication and learning to rely on each other! It's actually a really neat bonus.

3. Crazy thing happened last night. I was working through Lilia's bedtime routine with her (I put her to bed at 6:30 and then gave her her 9pm feeding before going to sleep myself) when I thought there was a thunderstorm. I couldn't figure out what the rushing water and pounding thunder sounds were. Jeff was making dinner in the other room and just as I was about to go ask him what was going on he came in and said, "The apartment above us is on fire." Freaked out would be an understatement. I grabbed that baby out of her bed so fast and we were out the door! The first thing I saw was the fire department -- 3 trucks and a LOT of guys -- and all of our neighbors outside watching. We were apparently the last ones to know. Praise God the fire appeared to be very small and everything seemed to return to normal quickly. Pray for our upstairs neighbors. I don't know the extent of things and they left last night before we had a chance to offer any assistance.

Updates All Around

1. We just got back from the "maiden voyage" of my parents' travel trailer in Prescott, which was awesome. We stayed at a campground at Lynx Lake, but it was the farthest thing from camping I've ever done in a campground! It was posh. Beds and couches, sinks and stoves posh. Definitely my favorite way to camp with an infant. And Jeff and I left said infant with my parents for about 4 hours yesterday while we went into Prescott and had a banana split. Then we went to Goodwill where I scored a cute shirt and a fabulous pair of jeans. Lilia did well during the day, but her nights were a little rough. So, all told, we're glad to be home. Pictures to follow.

2. Our offer on the house was accepted! We're on our way! WOOT!

Midwives and Houses and Teeth, Oh My!

Three basically unrelated updates today:

1. Went to the International Midwives' Day Celebration at Papago Park yesterday. It was lovely and sweet and hippie all over. The best part was seeing Sue, our amazing midwife, and finally getting a picture of her holding Lilia. She has the sweetest, most calming spirit. That's definitely a good thing in labor!

2. We saw and made an offer on a house this morning. We love the area, we love the floor plan, we love the front and back yards. We don't love the super 70's kitchen but these things can be updated in time. We're learning not to get our hopes up with each offer in this market. We could end up getting many offers rejected before someone accepts one. This house already has one other offer in, so they're looking for our "highest and best." We gave it to them according to our budget. So here's hoping!

3. A wonderful Bradley friend, Liz, e-mailed and suggested that Lilia's recent craziness could be due to teething/preteething. (Interestingly, our amazing midwife, Sue had suggested that she might be teething when we were going through something a little while ago, but it had gone away on its own so I didn't think much of it.) I looked in our fabulous Dr. Sears bible of babies and sure enough it seemed that Lilia is showing many signs of teething. So I called the pediatrician to ask what they recommend doing to help her with the pain and help her sleep. I left a message with the triage nurse. Well, I got a call back saying I needed to take her in today! The nurse even asked how far we live from the office and made an appointment in like 30 minutes. It scared the heck out of me and I actually cried on the way to the doctor. Of course it was in the afternoon so I was flying solo.

Well we got to the office and our pediatrician basically confirmed what I thought -- teething a little early. Nothing to be worried about at all. I posted on Facebook asking for advice and many folks recommended Hylands teething tablets, which are homeopathic and said to work wonders. I went right out to Target and got some, used them tonight and Lilia is sleeping peacefully as I write. Thank you Lord, and thank you to all those who suggested Hylands!

Now I'm going to go sleep peacefully. :)

Oh Blog, Where Art Thou?

In the words of Ferris Beuller, "Life moves pretty fast." (And so does this blog post because I have like 5 minutes. No editing, no overthinking!)

My life has, in fact, moved so fast that it's been very difficult to keep up with. Much less keep up with and reflect on.

First, big news. We decided to buy a house. I know my Dave Ramsey friends might hate me for moving our student loans into Baby Step 6, but at least listen to how it happened first, okay? Okay. ;)

For nearly three years we've been telling ourselves no, no no on buying a house. No matter what the market, we have debt and we've been following the Dave Ramsey baby steps which say no house until you're debt free with an emergency fund. Throughout those 3 years we've made great progress on our debt, paying off all of our credit cards, loans from family members and our car. We've also made the transition from two incomes to one pretty easily. But our student loans are huge and will take us several years to pay off.

Three things happened at once to finally change our minds about buying a house: First, our apartment complex raised our rent again. Second, we discovered that a mortgage on a house in the area we want to live, with a yard and three bedrooms, would be somewhere in the neighborhood of $150-200 cheaper per month than our new rent (which is very competitive for the area), including tax, title and insurance. Finally, we learned of an $8,000 tax credit for first-time homeowners (hello emergency fund!) and a generous family member offered to pay most of our down payment. With all of these in mind I called two wonderful wise friends who are on Dave's plan and told them two things: We don't want to do something stupid and we also don't want to follow the plan like it's a religion. Talking to them confirmed our decision for us and we went looking for houses. We have an offer in on one and are waiting impatiently to hear whether it will be accepted. So bring on the wet noodles, but we really feel we've made the right decision for us.

So, that was craziness #1. Craziness #2 is that we took little Miss Lilia Joy on her first road trip. We went to California to Jeff's parents' house to see them and Jeff's brother and his family, and also saw about a million friends and family members while we were there. It was fantastic to see everyone, but very difficult to travel for poor Lilia. She was so out-of-sorts the whole time! Poor Papa and Meme seemed to get the brunt of it, but they were absolutely sweet about the whole thing. They didn't give a word of advice, but sympathized and reassured us that babies cry and it doesn't mean a thing about us as parents. We were reminded how much we want to be like them when we grow up....

Lilia's cousins were so much fun, and loved her so much. It was wonderful to watch! And of course there were the doting grandparents and aunt and uncle, and great-aunt and great-uncle, and Meme and Papa, and our old Gang from the 'ville, and a million others. I'll post pictures as soon as I get a minute!

My head is in so many places that my blog needs to catch up. So hopefully another post tomorrow.

In the meantime, head over to my husband's new blog!

You know the thing about me and change?

This is a general update that I sent out to our small group today. So much to process for my little pregnant brain!!!

Hey guys,

Just a few updates from the ever-more-lively life of the Brooks-Dowtys:

--Having more and more pre-labor contractions, including two periods of time where they got regular and then stopped. But they're getting more intense with every "false start" so we're thinking things are getting close on the baby front. YAY!

--PRAISE #1: I sat down with my contract and my paystubs earlier and figured out that my school still owed me like $2500 or so because they paid me based on 12 months, but I worked half the contact in 5 months. That may not make sense, but anyway I got a paycheck today from my school that I didn't expect, and they still owe me like $500 so I'm really excited about that!

--PRAISE #2: Y'know the job that Jeff applied for "just to get his name out there"? They offered it to him today. They needed to know right away so we discussed and calculated fast and he took it.

--PRAISE #3: The increase in base salary for the new position makes up for the lack of commission, which is what we were praying for, so it looks as though Jeff has been able to move out of sales for good and just be in tech support, and we have a workable one-income budget.

--PRAYER #1: The new position is a graveyard shift, from 10pm-7am. It makes us a little nervous to make that leap, but it's very likely that it's only for 6 months or so. It's just kind of a big 6 months while we have a brand new baby. Please pray that we can handle it and make reasonable choices about our life. The great news is he'll continue to be able to do church and small group.

--PRAYER #2: The training for this new position is Monday. So we're not sure how that works with Jeff's leave or whether he'll need to come in one extra day or what. Please pray that they have another training he can go to that's more like 2 weeks away.

This is all happening so fast and I just wanted to ask for everyone's prayer and support while we navigate it all. It's a lot of change in a small period of time!

***************************UPDATE*********************************

Jeff got into a February 2 training class!!! YAY! Now we need to have this baby....