24 weeks!

24 weeks. 6 months. The point at which a baby becomes viable outside the womb. As long as I've been pregnant, I've been waiting for now. Now Baby Matthew, listen carefully. I don't WANT you to come now. You still have a lot of growing to do. So this is NOT an invitation. But I did breath a little easier knowing now that with each passing day, there is a greater chance that they could do something to help him if God forbid, something went wrong. It means that if we went to a hospital for help, they'd treat him like a person, not a "product of conception." Before now, if something went wrong, they'd tell me to go home and hope for the best. Now, they would/could actually do something.

I guess that probably all sounds a little morbid, but with a history of loss, you just tend to think about things like that. I praise God for each day that Baby Matthew stays put in his secret spot. He's growing so cozily in there and while pregnancy is tough, there's a part of me that could keep him in there forever because I know he's safe. So, thank you God, for 24 weeks. And in faith we're claiming 16ish more. Thank you for those, too.

We've had a nice week. My NVP was back with a *vengeance* this week which put a damper on things, but we were given much for which to be thankful.

It's finally starting to cool down here. We had one of the worst storms on record in Phoenix history this week-it was crazy. We had hail the size of quarters, and friends on the other side of town had hail the size of golf balls. Though it wreaked havoc on the landscaping around town, damage to life and property was minimal so God really protected our desert that is completely ill-equipped for any rain, much less a downpour.

DH's parents took us to lunch and gave us a sweet gift. Isn't this little monkey cute? He's a monkey on top and blanket on the bottom and he folds up into the perfect size for a diaper bag or stroller. He's super soft and I had to remind DH that he belongs to Matthew. They gave us a sweet little book, too. It's still so surreal to actually be receiving baby gifts. Every time, it's another realization that he really is coming. Somebody pinch me.


We think we made up our mind-ish on paint. Forgive me lousy photoshop skills but this is the mockup I made. This was our compromise--not quite pastel, but not earth tone or bright, either. We'll see how it actually looks. Unfortunately the fabric samples I ordered arrived and are pretty much useless, so I think we'll just go buy the valance or something small and then truck on over to Home De.pot from there. I'm terrible about actually converting the idea in my head to an actual paint color (do me a favor and don't ever ask my DH about the painting our kitchen incident!) Unfortunately the color that's perfect in my head never actually exists on a paint chip, so then we venture into the land of tweaking something existing, and I'm only successful part of the time. We'll see how I do! But anyway, here's the concept. We went with blue on top because we intend to hang the blanket, and it's got a green border around it so we thought it would pop better off the blue wall.


My Aunt and Uncle mailed us a card with a generous contribution toward Matthew's bedroom furniture. I just can't believe how generous people have been already, and he's not even here yet! Aunt and Uncle, if you're reading, thank you! We love you. Your gift was so completely unexpected and we are so grateful! It blesses me so much to know that Matthew already has so many people waiting in the wings to bless us and bless him. What more could a mama want?

We had a fun day yesterday. There's another couple in our church who is just 6 days behind us in pregnancy-that will be fun for our kids. We don't know them well, so we went to breakfast yesterday, which was nice. The youngest adult member of the WWF is getting married shortly, so we had her bridal shower yesterday afternoon. And last night we enjoyed dinner and goofy-golfing with the couples who got married earlier this year. I just love spending time with people we love. I haven't been able to do it much this pregnancy and I'm grateful I was able to do it yesterday. I'm sort of paying for it all today, but it was worth it.

God used a friend (friends?) of ours to bless our socks off yesterday. And we have no idea who He used. I was gone at the shower, and DH was out in the backyard with all the dogs (we have ours and my mom's 3 this week). Somehow during that tiny little window when I wasn't home and the dogs and DH weren't inside to hear, someone dropped off 3 gigantic boxes on our sidewalk. On the outside was a note.

Here's what was inside the boxes:




28 packages of 7th Generation Diapers: 4 packages of newborn diapers, and 8 packages each of sizes 1-3. We're just flabbergasted. Each package has at least 40 diapers in it, so there are over 1000 diapers here. By everything we can guess from reading, that's 3-6 months worth of diapers, depending on how big he is at birth, how fast he grows, and how quickly he goes through them.

We don't have *any* idea who our Diaper Fairy is. All we know is that he or she lives in Arizona, or knows someone who does, because the boxes were hand-delivered. There are no shipping, courier, or address labels on any of the boxes and no packing slips or anything inside. The other thing we can guess is that he or she reads either my facebook page or my blog. I had a discussion about cloth or disposable diapers on my facebook page and later announced there our ultimate decision to use this particular brand (they lack the chemical that concerned us about other disposables). Or, they read on this blog the name of the two stores we're registered at and looked at a registry and saw our brand preference. But those two things narrows the list down to oh, 150 people or so? We have no idea who it is beyond that.

So whoever you are, if you're reading, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you, from the bottom of our hearts. We are overwhelmed by your generosity. You've blessed us immensely. I teared up when I opened the boxes. After we opened 1, we thought "surely, the other two can't be diapers, too!" But they were. Your generosity overflowed. We were literally both speechless. We couldn't believe that someone would do that for us, and we are humbled. We know the person deliberately chose to be anonymous so we are intentionally trying not to "investigate" and find out who it is, so please accept our gratitude this way. Thank you for being an instrument of God's grace and provision and abundance for us. Whoever you are, we thank God for you and we love you.

I guess I'll close with what Matthew will be up to this week:

This is another big week for your magical growing baby! Just take a look at the checklist for this week: 1) ears: done; 2) fingernails: done; 3) (if you have a boy) testicles: taking their 3-4 day trip from the abdominal wall to the scrotum; and 4) lungs walls: secreting “surfactant”. What’s that? Well, surfactant is sort of what it sounds like: a surface-activated fat whose main purpose is to assist the your baby's little lungs during inflation (as in, filling with air, not getting more expensive). Just in case you’re curious, your submerged baby is still breathing in amniotic fluid, preparing and rehearsing the lungs an oxygen-filled life outside the womb. By the end of this week, your child will be weighing around 2 lbs and 14 inches long. Your cutie-patootie may even be a little more plump, but isn't anywhere near their full baby-fatted cute-self. Most of the “filling out” is coming up in that long awaited (and slightly dreaded?) third trimester. Woo-hoo! Get ready!

And here we are! I can't really see a change from week to week yet, but I'm really looking forward to scrapbooking them all together to see a progression.


Thanks for checking in! Have a wonderful week, all!