compelled by a higher power

olive is 3 months old yesterday...and that sound you just heard was my jaw hitting the floor. david weighed her in our sling/fish scale contraption and she's 14 lbs. i believe augustine was 13 lbs at 3 months so she is maintaining that identical curve. which means happy chunky baby through toddlerhood i hope! anyways she is such a joy to be with. my dad asked me once if i was considering weaning her onto bottles of expressed milk "so i could wean earlier". wha? i know that some ladies don't particularly enjoy nursing but not me. i love her one dimple - it continues to remind me of my grandma every time i look at it. it's funny - i remember having a dream when i was freshly pregnant with olive that i birthed her at my grandparents house. well the house that i grew up knowing at least. she was there and it made me feel very close to her, as i did most of my pregnancy with olive too. she sleeps so well that im baffled. last night i laid her down in our bed around 8:15 and sat next to her reading and within 10 minutes she was snoring. she was squirming around at 4:30 so i decided to just wake her up to nurse. i changed her diaper and it was DRY. wha? she rolls over all the time now and it makes augustine chuckle something fierce. i think he believes she is falling over on accident or something. oh and she is ticklish as heck on her inner thighs. gosh i just want to spend every day with my family i swear.

one of the surefire patterns to my life is that when i get inspired i run with it right away. i draw on countless places and people for such inspiration but when it comes it comes down hard usually. blueprint magazine/martha stewart living/kraft food ideas/etc. comes and i start cooking up a storm, a sermon at church and i want to start up a new ministry, maggie mentions a book and i fly to the library and pick up everything by that author, mothering magazine comes and i get inspired to write a new essay. i find it incredibly productive and exciting when i take on new personal projects, whether it be something small like trying out a new recipe or something larger like running our car on veggie oil. im not one of those bangwagon jumpers usually, who gets and idea and then let's it fizzle after i give it a whirl. my brain knows what it likes and wants out of life/relationships/etc. and typically i don't fiddle around with things that aren't going to stick with me for some time. exclusions to this are the short lived no-internet-after-9o'clock and read-everytime-i-nurse, oh and the garden. but the latter of those was because we decided to put out time and efforts into finishing the basement. no time and money to birth a baby, garden, and finish the basement at once so it met it's fate on the chopping block of self preservation.

people inspire me the most. just regular day to day joe's (and jane's) make my life so full and happy. simultaneously people are my greatest source of sadness. i finished up the secret life of bees and i couldn't help but relate to may's character and how she just absorbed the pain of the world and it sat on her chest and made it want to burst (and often did). i wish i could redraw boundaries and have a thicker skin. but at the same time i don't because that just wouldn't be who i am. i like that i cheer to the point of weeping at the olympics and get knots in my stomach when i hear anyone utter the N word. mostly God tells me these strong feelings are a gift, and that they mean something in the Kingdom. they compel me onward and upward (but sometimes a bit downward and sideways too). this above all is the root of the sweet and my sour to my world. sometimes i dont know where other people's pain stops and my personal stuff begins. sympathetic joy is one thing but the flip side is hard to live with.