This life

I'm sorry it's been a couple weeks since I last posted! It's been a hectic couple of weeks full of busyness and time with family. It's been so wonderful to spend time with the people I love the most.

Right now I'm up in bed taking some time to myself while my husband is laughing hysterically with his guy friends outside on the front porch. Kind of hard to write when I hear such boisterous laughter :)

I'm in week 26 with baby Elwood and I feel like it's flying by and taking forever all at the same time. I'm sure a lot of you mamas know exactly what I'm talking about. One day you feel like it was yesterday that you found out you're pregnant and others you feel like this pregnancy could possibly last forever.

I've been honing in on life lately and can't seem to get some thoughts out of my head. Right now I feel like I'm this precious time where I get to be so close to my loved ones and really experience and walk out life together. We've cried, laughed, played games, ate, and talked transparently. It's been the kind of moments that you want to just take a picture and hold on to it as long as you possibly can. Just a raw kind of life where things are very real and life seems so fragile and precious not to take with all the seriousness you can give it.

I only have this one chance to live life here on Earth and I am soaking up each day for what it is and learning so much about taking things in stride and grace.

This morning at church I just broke down in tears as I thought and looked around the room and was hit for the 100th (but it always feel like the 1st) time with how precious life really is.

I am such a fragile being. But God has so wonderfully been working and blessing me with this life. Showing me who He is and walking each step with me. Working in my family's life in such beautiful and mesmerizing ways that I just cry every time I even think about it. What grace and abounding love He has lavished on us!

Aiden reminds me of the fragility of life and how important it is to live and be present in each moment. Even as we prepare for Elwood's arrival, grief is as strong as ever. Celebrating holidays wondering what he would be like and what stage he would be in. Thinking about what foods he would have loved on Thanksgiving and what we would have bought him for Christmas. Telling him about the new baby coming into our lives and how we would need him to be a good big brother.

Grief is such a strange journey. As a friend of mine said so wisely tonight, "Grief is one of the strongest emotions." Such truth and boldness. Grief has a mind of its own. It's not like happiness, which is based on circumstances. Grief can hit you like a ton of bricks even when you are happy and sometimes it sneaks up on you when you least expect it. And most times, grief is a front-of-the-mind presence that you can coherently live with even though you feel like it's stock-piling every day you are without the one you lost.

It's not the kind of thing that you ever get over or get used to over time. It's just this thing that is always there that you have to continually walk with and learn its kinks. Unfortunately it's not something you can see coming or come down off of because it's always there doing different things. It brings out the most wonderful and the worst in ourselves. It knows us deeply.

I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm slowly realizing this thing called life makes me want to be focused and intentionally involved in every day. And that I want to learn how to see God more clearly through it.

I'll continue to write about this over the coming weeks as I see God stretching me and teaching me so much about it.

To be continued...