A couple months ago, I shared the happy news that Jonathan & I are expecting a new little one in September.

FIRST. I must say we are immensely thankful for this little life. We’ve loved it from the moment we knew it was inside me. Truly children are a blessing from God and the fact that I can carry this life in my body is nothing short of a miracle!

SECOND. While the idea of a new life is an incredible blessing, with this blessing also comes a significant amount of, well, pain, sickness, sleep loss, scheduling difficulties, hormonal changes, weight gain (and the subsequent weight loss to follow), and just an overall change to preeeeetty much every area of life.

I hit a wall in this pregnancy … probably around 11ish weeks or so, when amidst much hard crying I told Jonathan I really didn’t want to go through pregnancy again. [See paragraph above for reasons.] While he listened and tried to help, I knew this was a heart struggle for me. And heart struggles can only be resolved by wrestling in prayer and taking my struggles back to the One who gave them to me.

So wrestle I did.
And I realized this: I could either fight or surrender.

I could fight the change, hate it, and complain about it to everyone around me.
Or I could surrender to the God Who gave this gift to me and trust Him through the changes.

Although I truly desired to surrender and cling to God through the change, my emotions took a longer time to come around. So I prayed about that too. I asked God to help me to trust Him and to give me not just a love for this baby, but an excitement.

Wouldn’t ya know? He did.

I am excited. It’s not a “first baby” excitement but more of a reserved “I know this will be a lot of work, but it’s a BABY!” kind of excitement. I don’t know if you call that mature or maybe just pessimistic. Clearly, I would like to think of myself as the former, but I’m guessing I fall squarely in the latter category.

Either way, while I’ve been thankful for & loved this precious gift from the start, the excitement & trust factor took a bit longer. But that just goes to show that I’m a work in progress. I’m thankful for a good, patient God Who keeps working in my heart and drawing me to Himself. And He can work in your heart too, you know? Blessings indeed.

I’ve never been faithful in taking baby bump pictures. But I’m trying to do better this go around.
If that interests you, I try to post them each Tuesday on instagram. Would love to have you along for this journey!
Here they are so far:
11 weeks,
12 weeks,
13 weeks,
14 weeks,
15 weeks,
16 weeks.