Zoo, bugs, baby....oh my!

Ok, so none of those things in the title have anything to do with each other!  But I had to think of something, and these are the things I plan to write about :-)

Zoo:
For some odd reason Jedidiah has been obsessed about going to the zoo.  He asks me if we can go first thing in the morning, and continues to ask throughout the day....all. day. long.  One time I asked him why he wanted to go to the zoo.  I'm not sure if he wasn't sure how to answer, or if it's just that he's in the fledgling stage of learning the art of conversation, but he just sort of mumbled something and then looked at me.  Hmmm, I should help him out, I thought.  So I asked him if he wanted to see the animals. His face lit up and he started naming a bunch of animals that one would find in a zoo (giraffe, elephant, hippo, etc.).  I thought that was pretty neat, so I asked him again on another day with Jeremiah there so that he could hear Jed talk about seeing the animals.  Imagine my surprise when at the end he adds, "balls".  Balls?  What balls?  There are no balls at the zoo.  We figured out he was talking about the children's museum!  They had a ton of those hollow, colorful, plastic balls.  So since both of our memberships to the zoo and the museum will expire soon we thought we would go to both.  That thought lasted but a day, when Jeremiah got an email from a couple of parents from the kids on his soccer team telling him that their child was sick and couldn't play.  Not just a cold mind you, but strep.  Whoa!  Hold the horses!  There is no way I plan on reliving our strep experience that we lived through last year!!!  So NO kid's museum for us!  I feel bad about that, but seriously, we really can not afford to all be sick again like that.  Not that we couldn't pick up strep from Walmart or the likes.  But the kid's museum....well I mean we are talking about hundreds of kids a day *touching everything in sight*!  So to play it safe, we'll just go to the regular ole zoo.  Jedidiah doesn't comprehend "in a few days" so I am still being asked multiple times a day if we can go to the zoo :-) 

Bugs:
Ahhh, living in the south has it's advantages.  AND it's disadvantages!  The major disadvantage being bugs.  Bugs that are bigger and more plentiful and more varied than you will find in upstate NY, where I am from.  I don't like bugs, so this clearly is a sore spot for me living in the south.  But over the years I've gotten, if ever so slightly, better at dealing with them.  I mean now at least I will attempt to vacuum up any large crawling critter.  Which is better than popping a container over it and waiting for Jeremiah to get home to kill it.  So I've made some strides.  Anyways this summer I have to say was better in terms of the large buggies, and the annoying teeny tiny ones (ticks).  That being said it was the common house fly that got me!  Tons of them.  In my house.  *IN* my house.  I did say 'tons' right?  Yeah, not a pretty site.  Sigh.  So I was ever so pleased to see the cooler weather come to town as that meant a huge drop in the fly population.  So instead of 30 flies in my house I only have one at the moment.  Much improved!  But with the cooler weather came another critter, not a bug, that I was hoping we wouldn't see.  One night I was doing dishes and out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of *something* large and fast scoot under the cupboards.  OOOOoooh please tell me it's not a mouse, oh, please.......No such luck, it was a mouse.  I found out when I saw it run across our family room in the day time!!!!  Thankfully it was caught.  So mouse season has started!  Oh, joy! But lets go back to the bugs shall we?  Yes, I wasn't done with them just yet.  So after a busy Friday the girls were very eager to premake our Saturday ritual breakfast.  They said it would make the morning go much smoother if we had our pumpkin muffins made ahead of time.  I couldn't argue with that.  So off to the kitchen we went.  Much to my dismay we didn't have enough wheat ground up.  And there was no wheat in my gallon jars.  So off to the laundry room I went to refill said jars, only to find out that both my wheat buckets were empty.  I asked Isabella to bring out both bags of wheat from the boys bedroom closet.  After she brought out the first one I opened it to start filling up the buckets.  However something wasn't quite right with it.  There was a LOT of 'dust' in the wheat.  I wondered if the company didn't clean the wheat properly. I was a bit weary of it and thought I would go online to ask someone before I used it. But I didn't need to do that when Isabella called out that the other bag of wheat had 'ants' on it.  Ants???  Oh no, not ants.  Then she says, "oh, wait, no these are not ants, but some other little tiny black bugs".  Oh, that is pleasant, an unidentifiable black bug, just what I need!  I go back there to see, but she had brushed/killed them.  So I opened the bag.  Yup, little black bugs (I call them wevils).  That's when I notice all these itsy bitsy little holes all over the bag, where the bugs got in.  I go check the other wheat bag, the one I was pouring, and see that it is riddled with holes as well (we are talking about pin holes).  Sigh.  Two bags of wheat (my only two left) are no good.  Well, not entirely no good, as we took it out for the chickens, who are ever so happy with the grain AND bugs!  That's my bug story, I am sure you all wanted to hear it :-)

Baby:
One thing that made our Friday busy was having an appointment with the midwife.  I was ever so pleased to think that I had just hit the 28 week mark, hitting the third trimester milestone!!  Imagine my surprise and HERS as well that somehow I am actually 29 weeks along!!!  I missed my milestone! Oh well.  Somehow we both must have miscalculated or something!!  But I'll take 29 weeks, moving me ever so much closer to my due date :-)  This time around I really wanted to hear the heart beat.  I know I said I didn't want to use the doppler again, but I really miss not hearing my baby.   I told her that I wanted to know the heart rate this time, to see if it was a girl or boy heart rate.  You see, from the moment I saw the double lines on the pregnancy  test I *KNEW* that this baby was a boy.  I didn't just 'think' it was a boy, I KNEW it was a boy.  Over the months that hadn't changed.  Jeremiah joked early on in the pregnancy that we should find a name to see if it was a boy.  In case no one knows about our "name thing" it seems that I will get 'stuck' on one name, a name I HAVE to have.  Interestingly enough the name has always been the correct gender of our baby.  I told Jeremiah that it doesn't work that way.  The name has to just come to me, I can't search high and low for it.  Not to say we don't look for names, but just that the name will jump out at me.  So needless to say months have gone by and a few weeks ago I thought, hmmmm, it might be time that we put some thought into looking for a name, with only three months to go till baby comes.  We threw a few back and forth.  Nothing.  One thing that seems to shape our name picking is what type of 'season' we are in.  By that I mean our circumstances.  This particular baby is entering our lives at this particular moment.  And this particular moment happens to be a season that we are experiencing.....for each child it has been different.  With Saoirse, it was a season of 'freedom', with Jonah, it was a season of 'hope'.  With this child it is a season of 'reconcilliation/and seeing God moving in our lives'.  So with that backdrop we keep a look out for names that have a meaning that pertains to the season we are living in.  During one of our meetings with a small group member, going through a marriage book, he brought up the scripture of Jesus being the good shepherd.  BOOM!  Name alert!  The word 'shepherd' totally jumped out of me, and made my heart skip a beat.  But then at the end of the night he happened to mention another family in our small group, and I realized that they had a son named Shepherd!  It's obviously not a common name, so I didnt' want to 'steal' it from them, but I could NOT get that name out of my head.  I figured it would make a good middle name.  So my 'confirmation' that this was a boy grew.  But then, as we were looking for names the only name that I liked (although it didn't jump out at me) was a girls name!  How can that be?  I'm having a boy.  And you can all laugh, but it hit me.....by golly this baby just might be a girl!!!  News flash, hold the presses, I was seriously blown away by this ever so obvious epiphany.  Go ahead and laugh, but I am not kidding when I say this blew my mind.  A girl??  This baby *could* indeed be a girl.  Shock.  Speechless.  This was only made worse by my appointment with the midwife.  That heart rate I was talking about.....yeah, well she puts the doppler on me and it reads 160...that would be a girl heart rate!  I almost fell off her couch!!  But I could feel the baby kicking, which she also picked up on the doppler.  She was 'looking' around and found the placenta and the cord (how she can tell, I have no clue), and then she says, "Oh, wait, the heart rate is going down".  It finally ended at 137, a boy heart rate.  Seriously?  This baby is playing games with me!!!  Ha, ha.  We are assuming that the 160 was due to all of the activity (no doubt brought on by the doppler from past experience), and once the baby settled down so did it's heart rate.  So now I am back to thinking it is a boy.  Plus we may, I say "may" have a name.  It goes along with the meaning we are hoping for.  Plus it goes along with a pattern.  Oh no. not one of those again, patterns.  You see, this would be our third boy.  Flannery happens to be our third girl.  She is the only child that has a name that ends with the long 'e' sound.  All five of the others end in the 'uh' sound.  Plus her name, although from the moment I heard it was a girls name to me, pretty much most people think it is a boy's name.  And the name for this baby?  Well at the moment it ends in a long 'e' sound and although we will be using it for a boy, I do believe most people will think it is a girl's name.  I'm not going to tell what the name is yet, because we haven't settled on it at the moment.  But I do think those attributes are quite interesting.  And just as interesting and quite frankly *frightening*, Flannery, well Flannery, has been our child who stands out above the rest.  She's the child who I was sure one of us (either she or I) wasn't going to make it to her second birthday!  Although each of our children are different in each of their own ways, Flannery, well unless you know her, it's hard to explain, but she is the odd ball in our family.  I know that may sound weird, since with 6 kids, and all of them with their own unique personality, she's just different.  Probably more so just because she has been such a handful.  So this being (well, *IF*) our third boy.....I'm a little nervous.  Especially with this baby coming after Jonah.  Jonah's been a handful, but more because he is into everything. I am afraid to think of a second handful child in a row :-)  But God did promise us that He wouldn't give us more than we can handle, right?  Right?  Please tell me I am right :-) 

Ok, this has gotten long!  I've got a busy week ahead of me.  Hopefully it will be productive.  Have a blessed day!