Faith

Your kid has an incurable disease, now what?

osteogenesis imperfecta

In January, when we discovered that Jack had Osteogenesis Imperfecta, it was nothing short of traumatic.  Just a month earlier, I had gone through unmedicated labor for the fourth time.  I was much older than the last time I’d done that and frankly, it was miserable.  I’d spent a day in the hospital, trying to keep it together as I sent my baby off for a circumcision for the very first time and again when we discovered that Jack’s legs were unmistakably bowed and his left arm not moving properly.

Family Home Evening Lesson: For the Strength of Youth – Dress and Appearance

For the Strength of Youth FHE

We’ve been working our way through the sections in For the Strength of Youth for Family Home Evening.  This week we discussed Dress and Appearance.  We first took turns reading aloud a paragraph at a time, checking for comprehension along the way and then did an activity at the end.

Is God a chauvinist?

There’s been a lot of press in recent years regarding women who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seeking priesthood ordination.  I’m not sure how much of it has garnered national attention-it might just be isolated to LDS circles and/or news outlets in areas where a high percentage of members of the church dwell.  Regardless, I feel like I need to insert my two cents, not only so I can put down on paper how I feel about the issue, but to clarify for my friends who are not members of the LDS church that not all Mormon women share the same views on this topic.

For such a time as this.

Hindsight is truly 20/20.  Usually that expression is used to denote a bit of regret at decisions that perspective would have prevented.  Today, for me, it is an expression of gratitude at all the experiences I have had that have prepared me for what I am going through right now.  We cannot understand the full effect of life’s experiences until we can look back on them and their influence on today’s.

Four years ago, when Tim and I decided we wanted to have another baby, we fully expected to get pregnant within a couple of months as I had with my four girls.  Miscarriage was not even on our radar.  Our expectations completely shifted after 9 months of menstrual cycle after menstrual cycle and then 5 miscarriages within a 2 1/2 year period.  

Just like that, our lives changed forever.

Less than a week ago I was gearing up for a return to “normal”.  Less than a week ago the biggest challenge in my life was the grief I was suffering from not being able to breastfeed.  Now that seems like chump change.  I don’t mean to minimize breastfeeding struggles, they send me plummeting into the depths of postpartum depression – read more here about how I feel when breastfeeding doesn’t work out.  Still, breastfeeding issues seem trivial in comparison to the happenings of recent days in our family..

This past Sunday I returned to church for the first time since Jack entered the world.  He was exactly a month old, I had missed attending with my family, I was geared up to teach a lesson in Young Women.