We went along adjusting to our new home and our new baby girl. The next summer I got the exercise bug again (something that comes and goes on a random basis in my life) and I began to try to get back into shape. As always, I was just getting on a roll when something happened. I had had a hernia around my navel area that had previously only been noticeable at the end of my last couple of pregnancies. Unfortunately this time, the darn thing decided to act up when I wasn't pregnant! Not only that, but after about a week, it became incarcerated and needed to be operated on immediately.
Later that day, as I was being prepared for surgery, I casually mentioned that they should probably do a pregnancy test because there was always a chance that I could be pregnant. Right before surgery, the doctor called to tell me the test was positive. I was both elated and scared. I got the talk about how, because the baby was so "new", there was a good chance that I would miscarry. With an even heavier heart, I went into surgery, praying that this new life would be okay.
Well, we waited and waited, but as I healed, the baby continued to thrive. No miscarriage, no complications; at least not with the baby. My internal incisions, however, were another story. Obviously the surgeon new I was pregnant and that there was a good chance the hernia would "reappear", but he did what he could and used heavy-duty whatever-they-use to sew me up. As the baby grew, however, I noticed that there was this distinct point that was appearing in the area of my incision. Eventually, a hole wore through and out popped the end of the "wire". It was very interesting, and needless to say, quite uncomfortable. I then knew that the hernia was going to need to be repaired again.
About six months into the pregnancy, we were watching a Father Corapi video. He was telling us about how we needed to be heroic soldiers for Christ, how we needed to be willing to suffer for the conversion of our world. AMEN was my enthusiastic response. Bring it on! Okay, another lesson...don't say that unless you are really ready to accept what God is going to give you. Within one hour of that moment I was in tremendous abdominal pain. The baby had been doing a somersault to get into the "head down" position and ripped another hole in my abdominal wall! Hernia number two!
Well, time went on. Pope John Paul II died, I passed up my due date, none of my clothes fit because I was soooooo huge I thought I was having twins, and everyone was worried about how I was going to birth this baby without blowing apart my abdomen.
We had just returned from a prayer service at our church for the passing of the Pope when I went into labor. I was preparing to have a home birth with a wonderful midwife. She came out a little later and she was so calm and confident that it truly was the best birth out of all of them. Bouncing, baby boy #2 was born during the hour of mercy and he was...well, huge! In fact, the midwife had us get a bag of flour from the kitchen so she could test the accuracy of her scale. Our newest baby weighed in at 11 pounds 10 ounces. No wonder my clothes weren't fitting! The most incredible thing happened next. As we lay there, my new son and I, he looked into my eyes for the longest time...I mean REALLY looked into them, like he was looking into my soul. "This boy is destined for something great", I thought.
After eight weeks I went in and had both my hernias repaired with much better success this time. We successfully kept nursing throughout the experience, with only a short break for surgery and recovery.
I learned a lot about trust during this pregnancy! Trust in God that everything would turn out okay, no matter what. And God was faithful, as He always is. The grace was there when we needed it.
So that is our journey. I have learned so much throughout my pregnancies. What a blessing they have been. What an educational experience...one that has produced 7 fabulous gifts. God is good. All the time!
About 13 or so months later we were ready to try again. Since conception had been so easy the last 5 times, who would have thought that it would have taken us 7 months to conceive baby #6. I tell ya, just when you think you have things all figured out, God throws you a curve ball. Looking back I can see how His timing was PERFECT, but after the third month of trying, I was getting a little upset. I finally was able to turn it over to God's timing and I got pregnant (not that I'm saying that those two thoughts are connected :)
This time around we got ourselves into the middle of a very lengthy and stressful battle over buying a new house. The story is long and complicated...it actually involved three other houses plus the buyer of our house...and it is not something that I hope to ever go through again.
About the time I was due things with the houses were coming to a head. We had a buyer for our house and we were just trying to come to an agreement on the third house we had been trying to buy (the first two having fallen through). Now I had never gone past my due date so I thought it was safe to pray the following, "God, please let us have an agreement on this third house before the baby comes."
Of course you see the flaw in my prayer. I see it now, too, but I didn't back then. I naturally assumed that the baby would come on time, like all my other ones had, and that the house deal would fall into place before then. God, on the other hand, needed once again to show me that my timing isn't His timing! Instead baby #6 was 10 days late. I did find it interesting, however, that we signed the papers for the house at 2:00 in the afternoon and I went into labor at 3:00. Trust!
The next day our 6th child was born at home...another bouncing, baby girl (that's her in the white dress in the previous post :). She was wonderful and perfect, but our struggles weren't over. The next week she decided to go on a nursing strike. I've never had that happen before, and boy am I glad. That was very stressful.
A month later we had to move out of our house because the people who were buying it needed to close before we could move into our new house. People we knew from church were going to be out of town for two weeks, so they let us live in their house. The plan was that by the end of those two weeks, we would be able to close on our new house and move in.
Unfortunately, the people buying our house got denied at the VERY last minute and couldn't buy our house. We had already moved everything out and I just couldn't face moving back in again and our time was up in the house we were living in. Did I mention that I had a 6 week old baby and 5 other children??
We ended up moving in with my parents for a week while we somehow (miraculously??) got things all figured out. We were able to move into our new house in less than two weeks and within the next month we sold and closed on our old house.
I have definitely learned that when God wants something done, there are no delays and no glitches and things move very quickly. It is when He wants us to learn something from an experience that He drags it out or makes sure we notice the bumps in the road. This was such a trying time for all of us, but we were certainly glad to be settled in to a nice house with a lot of space around us. A great place for our growing family...
This post will be brief. Not because this child is any less special, but because the pregnancy and birth were pretty uneventful and the lessons learned were very "to the point"!
When baby number 5 was born, the whole house rejoiced because this baby was different...this baby was a BOY! Wow, after four girls in a row, what a change of pace. Bring out the blue! The girls were thrilled that it wasn't another girl. My husband was ecstatic. NOT that he didn't love his girls, but...well, you know,
Lesson #1: It is very important for a man to have a son.
Another important thing I learned was:
Lesson #2: Sons are different than daughters.
I remember during my babysitting years as a teen that I always seemed to get called by families with three boys. I remember on many occasions telling God in no uncertain terms that He better not give me three boys in a row when I had my children. Because of this, I learned
Lesson #3: God does indeed have a sense of humor.
I know now that He honored my "request" not to have three boys in a row, and instead, in all of His infinite wisdom, He sent me four girls in a row, which I believe have been more challenging to raise than any three boys would have been! I know He has been chuckling ever since :)
Now that we had "our boy" people naturally assumed we were done. I always had to chuckle at that one because every time I would have a baby, very shortly thereafter I would "know" that there was at least one more coming! True to form, I new there was another one in the wings. The question was...when?
This next birth left me learning another very important, although not necessarily faith-based, lesson and that is that some things are better left not shared with lots of people. Ranking right up there on my list of things better left not shared is the birth of a baby. Sorry, but my experience with this one confirmed that for me!
By the time I was pregnant with our next child, which was very soon after my miscarriage, we were growing in our faith by leaps and bounds, we had started homeschooling and I had discovered home births. Now I never thought I'd partake in one of those, but after my last experience at the hospital, I felt moved to give it a try.
At this point in my life I was full of exuberance and ready to take on the world, so I decided to invite my mother and mother-in-law to be with us at our first home birth. I don't think either of them talked to me for a week after that :) It was a rather difficult birth and there was a doctor, a doctor-in-training, two nurses, my husband, my mother-in-law and myself all in our small bedroom. My mother opted to stay downstairs with my children, it was the middle of the afternoon at this point, and to cover up my loud vocalizations they just kept turning the movie up louder and louder. Finally by 3:00 in the afternoon I was begging God for mercy (something I had never been able to do before because I didn't know anything about God's mercy :) and our fourth daughter was born at 3:28.
In my enthusiasm (or in reality, my deliriousness) I called my kids in to see their new sister. Unfortunately no one had been brave enough to tell me that I looked like death warmed over, so my girls were a bit taken aback when they walked in. It wasn't till I saw the pictures of them with their new sister that I realized how horrible I had looked. No wonder everyone was upset with me :)
The next few months were very trying for us. We were trying to sell our house (it was kind of funny that our agent had called during the birth to see if she could show the house. Now that would have been quite a "showing"), my husband's back went out in a major way, I had a crack in my nipple the size of the Grand Canyon so every time my daughter nursed I cried, and it was Christmas.
How I wish, as I look back now, that I could have been a much better sufferer! Hopefully during all of that time there was at least one millisecond that I was able to make use of. Why is it that many times we don't realize until we are out of the trial period how badly we behaved? It is a good thing that time as we know it does not exist with God, so maybe my desire to have done it all better can still be put to some good use.
Life went on and we somehow managed to sell our house and move to a bigger house closer to our church. As our faith grew, so did our family once again. When daughter number four was 13 months old, I found out I was pregnant again...
The pregnancy went along fairly well, not much that I can remember standing out about it, except that I remember craving Quarter Pounders with cheese, no onions the ENTIRE 9 months. Whenever this child has a problem, we blame it on all that high-quality pregnancy food!
So we finally get to delivery time and the contractions hit full force. We had just finished a lovely dinner of steak and potatoes when I started with these intense labor pains that would take my breath away. I called the doctor and couldn't even talk to him, so of course he told me to hurry on in.
Well, let's just say that he was a bit miffed at me when I got there and he checked me out just to find out that he left his house prematurely. Gotta love a doctor who gets ticked off in front of you because you thought you were going to have a baby any moment, but you really weren't. Oh well, in his frustration he decided to start me on pitocin, since he was already there and all. In my ignorance I said okay, since I was already there and all.
So here is where I had my introduction into how seriously God takes you when you say you're going to offer up your sufferings to Him. I thought that meant that I could have my epidural and offer up any pain and/or inconvenience I might feel beyond that. Sounded pretty good to me. He thought that meant that I should be pushed beyond what I thought I was capable of :) So they got the pitocin started, which got the contractions started, so I called for the epidural (which, if you remember, didn't work the first two times, so I'm not sure why I expected it to work this time) and, you guessed it, it didn't work. Well, one thing all of that did do was cause me to throw up my lovely dinner all over my wonderful husband :) Men have it sooo easy, don't they?
I take that back, the epidural worked for exactly 30 minutes; the amount of time it took me to pray my rosary, because I hadn't prayed it yet that day. Once I said the last prayer it stopped working again. By that time the pitocin was in full swing and I started telling the professionals in the room that it felt as if this baby was going to shoot out my stomach. Of course they didn't believe me, until I really started to tell them that if they didn't figure something out, this baby was going to shoot out my stomach right at them. That started everyone yelling at everyone else. The doctor was yelling at the nurse to turn off the pitocin drip, the nurse yelling at the doctor that she did and me yelling at both of them that they better figure something out quick!
Somehow our third baby girl was born the way she was supposed to be born and was just as wonderful as the first two. I have to say, however, that that experience made me very leery about offering up my suffering for something. I was so taken aback by the way it all went that for many years (okay, even 15 years later :) I have a hard time in offering something up for fear that it is going to get a lot worse! Trust! I still am working on that one!
I had a brief respite (well, an extra year) before I got pregnant again. First, though, I had another miscarriage. My other children were too young to really know what was going on, but in the way that children can be so perceptive, my eldest daughter came to me that day with a picture that she drew of her and her two sisters staring up at a rainbow. God is good! That is definitely a lesson I have been taught over and over and over again!
And so began the search...for exactly what, we weren't sure. We just knew there had to be something more exciting out there. Maybe another denomination? Maybe just another parish? God is so good, though, that He didn't make us search long. What was born next was what allowed our subsequent children to come into the world. Without this birth, none of the others would have been likely to occur.
About that same time, our Catholic parish was holding 40 hours of Eucharistic Adoration. I had no idea what it was, but I felt compelled to sign up. I showed up at my appointed time feeling pretty good about myself for doing something so holy (even though I still wasn't sure exactly what it was I was doing :). I grabbed a book on my way in about examination of conscience. I began thumbing through it and boy did my mind start to reel.
What did they mean that birth control was wrong? Why weren't other denominations the "true" church? You mean I couldn't pick and choose what I wanted to believe?
Believe it or not, this was all news to me. Still unknown to me was that this was the beginning of the birth of my faith. God used a childhood friend of mine to begin to bring the truth to me, as well as a powerful movement of the Holy Spirit. My short search ended right then and there. I believed in everything the Catholic church teaches - lock, stock and barrel.
But back to that birth control thing. Our second daughter was only 6 months old. I still wasn't convinced I wanted more children, although I knew it was wrong to use birth control to prevent them. What to do? We called our parish and took a crash course on Natural Family Planning.
God was so patient with us as we learned about our faith and learned to trust Him. We might not have been completely ready (but then again how many times are you really ready?) but five months later we found out that our third baby was on its way. Our first post-conversion baby! How exciting! Finally I would know what to do with all that suffering...
After about a year I started to think, "What if it takes me three years to get pregnant again?" We really didn't want our kids to be four years apart in age, so we began to think that maybe we should start trying again. Not that I had any thoughts at that time about what God could or couldn't do, but He found that tiny crack in the door and stuck His foot into it.
Wow, were we surprised. Within that first month we had conceived again and nine months later we had another bouncing, baby girl. The pregnancy itself was rather uneventful but the delivery was a little more difficult. With our first baby I had tried an epidural but it didn't work very well; everything was completely numb except this small area above my left hip bone. All the pains of labor came pouring out of that one small spot. However, this time I was more optimistic, so I tried again. Unfortunately this one didn't work at all. To top it off, I had gone into labor right while I had the stomach flu. Try having contractions while you're running to the bathroom to throw up...well, I won't go into all the gory details.
Our little girl was born (sunny side up, I might add) and...slept, and slept and slept. I look back now and wonder why no one told me she looked so emaciated. You could light a bomb under that girl and she wouldn't wake up. Good for my sleeping, not good for her nursing.
So we managed to make it through that time, as well as all of the adjustments that come with having two children instead of just one. At that time, my husband and I began searching. It just seemed as if there should be something more to life. I had my two kids (in my mind, I was DONE :), I was working on getting my teaching certificate, I should be fulfilled, shouldn't I?
It was during this first year of our second daughters life that God started to make His presence known. It was time for me to do my student teaching and I got hooked up with some great fourth-grade teachers who also happened to be Christians...you know, the kind who actually TALK about their faith.
I'd come home and share with my husband what they would talk about and what they would tell me of their churches and we began to wonder if maybe there wasn't something better to be found beyond the confines of our lack-luster Catholic faith. Maybe we should go shopping, we thought...
...and this time, 9 months later we were the proud parents of a bouncing baby girl. She also turned out to be a very agreeable, totally flexible, baby girl, which was a good thing.
At this point, I still didn't know God, I still didn't understand suffering and I was still on the "life just isn't fair" tour. While I had been pregnant, both of my grandmothers died. It just didn't seem fair that they had waited so long to see my baby and neither of them made it.
I also discovered during the pregnancy that I had a thyroid tumor. The doctors did what tests they could at the time and couldn't come up with anything conclusive, so once our daughter was born I had to undergo more tests. The result of all that was that when she was 8 weeks old I was scheduled for surgery to have it removed.
I desperately wanted to nurse her so I worked very hard with a lactation consultant to pump and store my milk so that she could still receive my milk through the surgery. The hospital was great; they put me on the maternity floor so I could have her with me and worked with me to get her nursing again.
The week before my surgery, I also started having gall bladder attacks. Fortunately I was already scheduled for surgery, so the doctors decided to do a 2 for 1 deal on me. If the gall bladder went well, which it did, they would move on to the thyroid, which they did. What a deal!
My daughter took to nursing again only to be cut off once more for good, because two months later I had to go back to the hospital for radiation since my thyroid tumor was cancerous. Oh the frustrations of having a 3 month old and not being able to hold her close to me at all for the first week, and then only for short periods of time for a few weeks after that.
The lessons I learned during this time only came to me after I had my conversion. I can look back now and see how God's hand was in everything. I am thankful for the grace that I can see was present then, even though I didn't realize it at the time. I am thankful that God made my daughter as laid-back as she was. I didn't see any of this then. It just all seemed unfair. If I have one regret about all of this, it is that I wish I could have made use of all of that suffering. It seems like such a waste to have not done anything with it. However, since God does not work within our time constraints, maybe He still made use of it.
I'm happy to say that things got better after those first three months. It's funny, though, how after trying for so long to get pregnant, I still only wanted to have two kids and I was in no hurry to have another one. However, our plans are not always God's plans, especially when we aren't working that closely with Him...
Last week my youngest child turned six. We got to reminiscing about his birth and, well, him in general. Later on I really started thinking about all of my pregnancies and first few months of babyhood and I realized that God has used that time with each new baby to teach me A LOT! Each time was a different, but equally powerful lesson. I thought it might be interesting to put it all here so that I can have a record of it for myself, as well as for anyone else who likes to read these kind of stories.
As an introduction, my husband and I were both cradle Catholics when we first got married. We went to Mass on Sunday most of the time, and if we didn't make it, at least I still felt guilty (I know, pretty pathetic, huh?). After a year of being married, we decided that we were ready for kids. God, however, must have decided we weren't because we tried for almost three years before we finally conceived. Our first pregnancy, so much anticipated by us, ended after a few short weeks in a miscarriage.
After trying for so long, we were devastated to see it end this way. At that time I knew nothing of suffering or of perseverance. I didn't know how to "offer it up". I looked at others I knew who were conceiving children out of wedlock and was mad. Here I was doing it the "right way" and this is what happened! No matter how I looked at it, it just didn't seem fair. That, unfortunately, was the lesson I was learning then...life isn't fair. You can do everything right (which of course I really wasn't :) and still life will deal you an unfair hand.
That was a very difficult time in our lives, but what could we do but pull up our bootstraps and try again. Shortly thereafter, we conceived again...
