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2008-05-05 - 1:31 a.m. previous entry next entry
Boys stats, God provides, and a few photos! :)
Hello, you sweet peoples! :) Thank you for missing me!
Well, it's late (what's new?!) and it has been soooo long since I updated - I'm sorry! My pregnancy diary is now officially closed (waaah!) because Nathan has "come of age" and is now well outside of newborn status! So he joins the merry band of brothers here at arthursmummy! :) I will sooooo be back at that diary though, later this year (even if just to waffle!)!
Neil and I had a tummy bug this week which has knocked us out a bit. Yes, I said TUMMY BUG! So casually, too! Hehe. Nope, I am still petrified of throwing up, but thankfully I did not have to do it with this bug. I did have five days of the other business though, which I will take HANDS DOWN over Neil's double fun in the bathroom with a bowl, ugh. Neil did throw up a fair bit, and I did get scared about that, but I had little boys to look after and explain what the noises in the bathroom were, etc (calmly!), so I survived and it wasn't so scary as I remember it being when other people throw up in my immediate vicinity! Neil's version was quick and nasty, but the tummy aches, exhaustion and lack of appetite lingered like mine did. I got it first THANKFULLY - boy I would have been soooo scared had he thrown up and THEN I started to feel ill myself! I just presumed it was the worst IBS ever for a couple of days and then started to think, "Hmmm..." and then Neil was sick, so yeah. I'm so so so thankful I did not have to be sick! Phew!
Another thing I'm hugely thankful for is that (so far) none of the boys have come down with it. We all eat the same stuff so I'm sure it wasn't food poisoning. We're being careful with handwashing, etc. Counting 3 days from the last yucky symptom, we should be germ-free tomorrow, yay! :) Bennie and Sarah and Thea are coming round tomorrow to see us! Thea will be a year old on the 15th - how crazy is that?! And it's somehow only just over a month until Matthew's SECOND birthday!! Yikes!
Matthew and Nathan have a little mild cold at the moment, but they're doing fine. Arthur is doing great, but he's tired a lot. We started him on some children's vitamins but he hates the taste so we'll try a different brand.
I weighed and measured the older boys a few weeks ago, and Nathan was weighed and measured recently too, so I'll put all those stats here for my own reference:
Arthur at 3 years and 4 months:
Height: 98cm (38.5 inches) - 45th percentile
Weight: 15kg (33lbs) - 40th percentile
Matthew at 21/22 months:
Height: 83cm (32.5 inches) - 20th percentile
Weight: 10.7kg (23.5lbs) - 15th percentile
Nathan at 3 months (for his adjusted age of 2 months which is what he should be, had he arrived on time!):
Length: 59cm (23 inches) - 70th percentile
Weight: 5.95kg (13lbs 2oz) - 75th percentile
I'm amazed that somehow, although they are all on different curves, they are in proportion with height and weight! Arthur has slimmed down so much since his chunksome baby days (he was up in the 90th percentile back then!), and Matthew has actually come up a little from his baby days - his percentiles were always low. I have no idea what Nathan will settle to yet, as it's too early, but he's doing great at the 70th/75th percentile at the moment!
I love that they are all still getting breastmilk. I know that I am increasingly going to look STRANGE to most people, but oh well. I love it, and the boys love it, and really they are ALL still so little. I'm glad to give them such a great start! I honestly can't remember what it's like to NOT breastfeed now, lol! So I'm happy :)
Neil still does not have a job. April 23rd marked 6 months that he has been out of work. Wow! We are still holding fast to God and trusting him for his provision. The more tight things become and the more time goes by, the more we are encountering doubt from others around us. Frustratingly, we're getting quite a bit of it from friends at CHURCH, of all places! It's kind of bothering/upsetting us and we've been talking about it a lot lately, but hey ho. Sometimes we wonder if we should mention how we feel about it to someone at church? I don't know.
Anyway. I haven't got a lot of time to write much tonight, but we are continuing to pray together and I have NO anxiety over the huge debt and lack of income or job on the horizon, etc. None. I KNOW God will provide at exactly the right time, even if it gets scarier than this before that happens. I have a written prayer journal these days (*NEW*!! So excited about my prayer life taking off a bit more again! Yay!), and I wrote this tonight after Neil and I were chatting and praying. Whizzing this off here will be faster than my normal pace of thinking, waffling, and getting off-track! ;)
"Huge urge to pray/wait on God tonight, about WHAT God is leading us to do in our situation - not "which job should Neil get?", but in answer to the unspoken question from a worldly (and, irritatingly, Name-of-our-Church-ly) point of view: "If your situation is so dire (money gone, �30,000 debt, credit card which is our very last source of anything is about to max out, etc) - WHY aren't you being more proactive and putting yourself out for any and EVERY job available, even stacking shelves, just for some form of income?"
I get it in my diary guestbooks, we hear it (implied often) at church, from family and friends (though not all), and anyone random who hears about our situation, it seems.
Is THIS God telling us to do just that? Or a worldly view that we aren't meant to be focusing on right now - surely we should be listening to GOD instead, no matter if his instructions look like folly to the world.
But have we missed something God has told us to do? Is everybody right? And are we acting out of line with the Bible? What HAS God told us to do? Do we really feel that he HASN'T led us to apply for every job under the sun as if our lives depended upon it? We are trying to apply this question and be as honest with ourselves as we know how to be.
So far, we feel that God has not said to go applying willy nilly. But he hasn't said NOT to, either. Is that a given, that we SHOULD apply like crazy? We've been praying all along about which jobs Neil should make himself available for (apply for), rather than praying for God to give the right job and then applying for everything. Maybe we should have? Maybe that would show greater faith?
Often when there are no jobs and things feel a bit desperate, we ask God to speak to us and guide us, show us, ANYTHING (!), to know that there's a direction we should turn in, THIS path to walk down, etc. Something clear and proactive, please Lord! But when we pray and wait, we always just get clear words and pictures and Bible verses that simply tell us to either WAIT, or don't address the job/money situation at all, but instead gently remind us to fix our eyes on Jesus, to look ONLY at God and NOT the world, or simply just to enjoy intimacy with our God - to pour out our love for him and to experience being loved by him."
I guess that sums up where we're at right now. I just trust God. I do want to share something AMAZING that happened to us since I last wrote here, that really does show that our God is real and cares about us, and is so faithful to us!
Since Neil left work, we figured out about a month ago that we had amassed about �15,000 in debt during that time. Roughly. We were just boggling over that rather scary fact, and praying in faith that God would provide (as we have been throughout), when a couple of weeks ago, our next door neighbour came to the front door. I just want to shout God's praises telling this story!! :)
He would like to buy the far end piece of our back garden for storage purposes (he's a gardener). As a piece of land, it's worth about �2,000. He so badly wants it, and he knows that it will knock a chunk off the value of our property. We arranged to get our house valued, and ask advice on the value of that piece of our garden.
End result: Our neighbour suggested that he would like to pay us �15,000 for that piece of our (unused, really) garden. The price was his suggestion, and the estate agent said it was a sensible offer. We had no idea whatsoever what the value of a little piece of our garden was! Our neighbour needs to take down the hedge and probably mess up our (badly done by Neil - sorry love!) lawn, but being a gardener, he would re-do our lawn to compensate for any damage, and put a new fence up (ours just blew down) at no cost to ourselves. The estate agent said it might knock up to �15,000 off the value of the house when it sells, but who knows - it depends on the buyer. He said it may sell for the same as it would have sold for with the garden intact (there's really no knowing), so he recommended taking the neighbour up on his offer! So we will!
God has just provided for us. How random and unlikely is it for us to have no income, amass �15,000 worth of debt due to the no-income, and then a neighbour we rarely converse with strolls round that same week and says, "Hey, I would like to carve off a piece of your garden that you don't use for my own use. Yes it's not worth much but how about I pay you �15,000 for it? I have the funds ready to go in my bank and can start work immediately if you give me the green light."
I love you, O Lord, my strength! Is God not just the most awesome and wonderful Provider? Did I not tell you that he would provide?! I'm so excited!
"Your ways, O God, are holy. What god is so great as our God?" (Psalm 77:13)
Well on that wonderful note, I have to go to bed. It's so late! Nathan just coughed in his sleep and brought me back to reality with a thump, hehe! I probably could have spent the next three hours typing out God's praises! :D
Thank you so much for all the lovely comments after my photos at the park last entry! :) I have lots more photos to post but no time tonight. Oh, go on then - just a few! ;)
Mat-ful of boys :) I love the nutty hysteria of my bigger boys in the second photo (extremely normal sight around here, by the way), and Nathan's face - "What the heck have I got myself into?!" hehehe!
Recent entries.....
Moving time... - 2009-01-04
Christmas Eve! - 2008-12-24
Long-overdue update, a few Nathey pics and a video clip :) - 2008-12-01
Lots of news! - 2008-11-03
Nathan at 8 months... - 2008-10-12