24 weeks!

Viability point in pregnancy is always relieving.  Happy to have made it here!

Like I said earlier last week, I am quite miserable.  I know this is all more than worth it.  I have two amazing children to remind me of that.  But man, each pregnancy is so much tougher than the one before!  Exhaustion, horrible eczema, pain that's started much earlier, ravenous appetite, returning morning sickness.  Dizziness.  It's just been a real joy.  No sarcasm, of course.  ;)

I'm placing my official bet on this being a girl now.  I know I've wavered so much back and forth most of this pregnancy, but this one is shaping up to be so similar to Adalyn's that I just have to go with girl (although it could just be more similar to hers because it's my third pregnancy and hers was my second and each one is tougher on the body, but that's my official guess).  Especially with the returning morning sickness that has me actually throwing up at 24 weeks.  Blech.  

The kicks have reached that point of physically hurting but also becoming visible on the outside, which is a super fun point in pregnancy.  Tim finally gets to be part of it!  He can feel them and see them.  

Nothing else to report except that I went through a HUGE growth spurt in the past two weeks.  It's not quite as obvious in these pictures as reality, but overnight I grew out of all my size small pants and my belly just exploded!  For fun, let's compare 12 weeks to 24.  :)

And because I am the dorkiest pregnant woman ever, I totally just dug up my 24/25 weeks pictures from my other pregnancies since I had a sneaky suspicion that I was much smaller with Adalyn at this point.  I was totally right.  Sigh.  Maybe this is a boy afterall?  I look much more like I did with Ben at this point.

Why can't I stop overanalyzing everything?!

I'm a (more) liberal Christian

Okay, I'm not really liberal.  Truth be told, I now lie somewhere between liberal and conservative.  In the old days, I was pretty hardcore liberal, pretty staunchly Democrat.  Now I'm socially liberal and economically conservative.  I think we should always be re-evaluating our positions.  If we didn't, our country would still have slaves and racial inequality.  And I would still be a die-hard liberal Democrat.  :)

This post has been in the works for literally a year.  I write it and then delete it.  And then I re-write it and then delete it again.  But every few months, this idea that you can actually be liberal and Christian (shocker!), resurfaces and I feel the need to defend myself all over again.  

Like I said above, I am constantly re-evaluating my positions.  At one point I was pro-choice.  Now I'm mostly pro-life with continued confusion over the extreme cases (will I ever feel confident in saying that there is NEVER a time for abortion?  I don't know).  At one point I was a believer and follower of the Weston A. Price type of diet.  Now I'm obviously not.  At one point I practiced "Attachment Parenting."  Now I mostly don't.

I think the best thing we can do is be constantly asking ourselves if what we're doing is right, and when we're presented with new information, we should listen.  To be open-minded is to be informed.  Being open-minded doesn't mean you have to accept everything you agree to listen to, but to listen and absorb and consider it.  If it doesn't align with your beliefs, there is absolutely nothing wrong with disagreeing with it, as long as you have listened and considered.  Without that, where would our country be?  

In fact, Jesus went against the grain.  What he did was not the norm and it was not accepted.  To model ourselves after Him is to make sure we're never just accepting status quo without much thought and contemplation.  We must always be evaluating and praying and reading about (and modeling ourselves after) Jesus' life.

So, listening and considering and reading my Bible and becoming a Christian changed me.  In many, many ways.  But despite listening and absorbing the things my Christian conservative friends and family have explained to me, I still hold strong to my belief in the more liberal viewpoints of our country.  And it is because of my religion that I feel even more strongly about my social liberalism than I ever did before.

What do I mean by being socially liberal?  I like Webster's definition of liberal as being "marked by generosity" and "not bound by authoritarianism, orthodoxy or traditional forms." 

Socially, or how we relate to each other/individuals, I believe pretty wholeheartedly that what Jesus taught us is reflected in the liberal viewpoint.  Matthew 25:40 tells us, "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me."  Matthew 5:42 says, "Give to the one who asks you and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you." 

I've had friends argue that the church should be doing this and we should not be forced into it, but as has been proven by the mere fact that even with forced generosity, the needy are not being taken care of (i.e., people are still starving and homeless) and before the current welfare systems were put in place, there was obviously still much need or they never would have been put in place to begin with, the churches are simply not able to right now.  We can argue semantics - who and how should charity be given - but the mere fact of the matter is that the church is not taking care of everyone who needs it and neither are we as Christians.  We see our brothers in need and if we refuse to take care of that need (in my mind, voting against these programs is refusing to take care of that need), how is that Christ-like?  Why are we fighting against universal health care?  

I've heard one too many Christians complain that people getting welfare can probably get a job.  Did Jesus say to us, "Help the needy unless they are lazy or might develop a drug problem"?  Jesus didn't qualify it.  And who are we to be the judge?  Jesus was homeless.  How many of you would have deemed him not worthy of help because he could have gotten a job or maybe he was just a junkie?

Matthew 25:31-46 is an incredible passage to read.  It conveys just how important it is to God that we take care of the needy.  In summary, Jesus says that the King will tell those on his right, those who provided for the needy, to come with him to the kingdom prepared for them, to eternal life, and to those on the left, those who saw people in need and did not help them, to go away to eternal punishment."  It is unarguably clear that helping those in need - generosity - is something incredibly important to God.

Many conservative Christians (not all, probably not even a majority, but a lot of the ones in my life) have this perception of liberals as abortion-loving atheists who desperately want things like same-sex marriage and accept all religions.  That's just not the case.  

First, being pro-choice does not equate to liking or even supporting abortion.  Most women who are pro-choice still hate the idea of abortion but want the decision left up to the woman carrying the baby.  While I don't support this position at all, I can say from personal experience that you can be pro-choice and not love abortion.  I have many pro-choice friends to this day who would never choose abortion for themselves.  But regardless, being liberal and being pro-choice are not one and the same.  I am (more) liberal, but I am not pro-choice.  I didn't conveniently choose this new position because I'm now in a place to take care of a child as some people imply, but because I was saved and God spoke to me on this issue and I was shown an ultrasound of an abortion being performed and all of those things radically changed me.  I may believe what I believe strongly, but I'm not too stubborn to listen to other viewpoints and come to new conclusions.

I struggle on a daily basis with the idea of homosexuality.  I have seen a convincing documentary on how we may have misinterpreted homosexuality to be a sin (For the Bible Tells Me So), but I don't have a strong enough opinion on the matter yet to say with certainty either way what I believe.  I know I pray on this particular issue constantly because I still am so unsure.  I do believe - with every fiber of my being - that nearly all homosexuals are born that way.  And as a friend pointed out to me today, "We cannot honor God by dishonoring his creation."  How profound is that?  Whether or not we believe homosexuality is a sin, we cannot deny that all humans are God's creation and loved by God.    Even if you are certain that homosexuality is a sin, it is never acceptable or Christian behavior to belittle or tear down one of God's creation.  As a matter of fact, Jesus told us that the second most important commandment is to "Love your neighbor as yourself."   First Peter 1:22 tells us to "Love one another fervently."  There is no denying that we are called to love each other.  A Christian group of women on facebook called "One Million Moms" called for Ellen's job as a JC Penney spokeswoman.  That is not the type of behavior Jesus modeled for us.  

Being socially liberal means respecting other religions.  It does not mean accepting other religions.  The Bible is very clear that Jesus is the ONLY way to salvation.  In John 14:6 Jesus says, "I am the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me."  Respecting another's right to practice a different religion is not only a loving act, but it opens the door to teaching them about Jesus.  

I believe that Jesus showed us how to treat fellow Christians we know are in sin.  It is not by alienating them or tearing them down or publicly shaming them.  It is not by violently opposing their lifestyle.  It is by gently and lovingly showing them the Truth.  We are also called to be a light.  We are not supposed to hide from the world, we are supposed to live in it and lead by example!  We are not supposed to shun those who are not Christian.  We are supposed to love them!  These are very simple truths in the Bible, yet as a whole, we Christians have forgotten these truths in our quest to make everyone in our country a Christian and force those who aren't to live by our morals and our standards.  The typical Christian viewpoint, at least as expressed in the average Christian behavior these days, is to tell the sinners or the non-religious to just go to church or just get a job or just clean up their lives or just stop sinning, but we don't offer love and grace and guidance.  So how can we expect that?

My objective here is to explain my views, because some conservative Christians in my life have implied or even flat-out accused me of being a fake Christian because I'm liberal.  I'm not here to tell you, if you are a conservative Christian, that you are not a real Christian.  That is between you and God, and you know in your heart what you are.  Please don't tell me that I cannot be a liberal and a Christian, because that's simply not true.

I would even go so far as to argue that I have come to my decision to be liberal with more thought and contemplation than many conservatives came to their decision to be conservative.  I'm not saying all by ANY stretch of the imagination (and I'm not saying that about you), but I think a lot of Christians are conservative simply because that's the norm.  That's the status quo.  If you're a Christian in America, you're conservative.

If I've offered you food for thought, wonderful!  I don't expect everyone to read this and have an "Aha!" moment.  I won't argue with you that your differing viewpoints are wrong.  I'm only offering my viewpoints with reasoning for them all.  I'd encourage you to listen just as I've listened to my conservative Christian friends, but certainly don't expect you to come to a different conclusion than the one you've come to already.  Just be open-minded to at least understand that one can be a Christian AND a liberal.

And please stop giving me that, "Oh, you poor, misinformed thing" look when I tell you I'm liberal and Christian.  I promise I'm informed.  That's the one thing I can confidently say about anything that is important to me.  I am INFORMED.  I seek out new information every single day of my life.  I crave knowledge like I  crave donuts.  :)

I completely respect the right of any Christian to fall on any part of the liberal-conservative spectrum and I trust that if you say you are informed and you say you have come to the conclusion you have based on thought, you mean that.  I don't want anyone to read this and think I am cutting down their opinion or trying to argue that they're wrong.  This is simply my opinion and how I formed it.

PS - Click here to read a very interesting study looking at how the increase in Bible reading leads to an increase in more liberal thinking that a friend shared with me.

Holy pregnancy pain, batman!

During my first pregnancy I had almost no pain.  I didn't waddle.  I didn't cringe when I had to stand up from sitting.  All-in-all, it was a great pregnancy.  I was the crazy, hormonal pregnant woman that I still am today, on my third pregnancy, but as far as morning sickness and weepiness and pain?  Not so much.  It was easy.  

With Adalyn's pregnancy, the real pain kicked in around 27 weeks.  I remember thinking something was wrong at first because I didn't have that sort of pain at any point during my first pregnancy, but my OB reassured me that each pregnancy is more difficult than the previous one.  She wasn't kidding!  I had the morning sickness and the weakened immune system that left me sick most of my pregnancy and the early contractions and the 4 weeks of prodromal labor and the insane pelvic pain and so on and so forth.

Knowing this, I braced myself for earlier pain this time.  I was right.  It all started on Sunday, when we got out of the car from an 18 hour car trip and it was late and I practically fell to the ground with the shooting pelvic pain.  I chalked it up to the long car trip, but it's now been about a week and each day the pain is worse.  It's just like the pain I  had with Adalyn's pregnancy except it's earlier this time around.  I'm only 24 weeks pregnant but I've already hit the point where I don't stand up unless it's absolutely necessary because I know that when I do, I'll get that shooting-pain-that-makes-you-want-to-cry thing.  And each step is like daggers, well, down below (sorry).  I'm finding that even laying down isn't giving me total relief.  Sigh.

If I wasn't already completely positive I don't want a fourth child, this would do it for me.  I am in absolute awe of women who have 4, 5, 6, 7+ pregnancies.  If each one is worse than the last, you women are saints.

What a whiny blog post, huh?    

What Dave Ramsey has done for us.

That's our "new" van.  We paid for it in cash and still have a paid-off Camry sitting in our garage that blue books at $10,500 that we're about to sell FSBO.

We're about to have our third child, so our little beloved Camry isn't going to cut it anymore.  We've been looking for a van for awhile now.  It's amazing that I was excited to get a van.  Me?!  The girl who swore I would never, ever, ever have a minivan!  

A year ago, we would have either traded in our Camry for a more expensive, low mileage van and probably acquired another car payment, or at the very least we would have sold our Camry FSBO and taken the inheritance we recently got and used both of those funds to buy a relatively nice, new van.

But then we took Dave Ramsey's FPU.  While we aren't the perfect students (I admit that we haven't done the cash envelopes on a few occasions), we've made huge strides and already paid off a ton of debt.  In a few months time.  

And amazingly, we're about to pay off well over $10,000 in debt.  All because we decided to sell our Camry FSBO and buy an old, used van.  It's not the most glamorous van in the world.  It has some dings and scratches and less perks than we're used to in our newer Camry, but I love it.  I love it because it is bringing us financial peace.  I love it because it was DIRT CHEAP but came with the mechanic's seal of approval (unlike all the Siennas we took to get pre-inspected that were literally double the cost and had tons of mechanical problems).  I love it because we were patient and waited for the perfect deal instead of rushing to buy the first one we saw, which would have cost us double what this one did.

When we started FPU a few months ago, we mapped out a course to becoming debt-free that was going to take us about 2.5 years.  Now, thanks to decisions like the above one and saying no to new clothes or that Starbucks I want so badly, it's looking like we are going to cut that 2.5 year timeline in half - if not more.

Imagine if we're debt-free before this new baby reaches his or her first birthday!  Thanks to some really stupid ideas and decisions on my part as an 18 year old naive girl, I haven't been debt-free since before the age of 19.        

Because of Dave Ramsey, we also put our old car payment that we no longer have into a savings account each month so that when we drive this Odyssey into the ground, we'll get to pay for our next car in cash, too.  

It's literally blowing my mind that we're getting so close to being debt-free.  The freedom that will come on the day we have only our mortgage left will be unreal.  It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.

Thank you, Dave Ramsey.  You're sort of my hero.  :)

And seriously, if I can do this, literally any person walking the face of this planet can.  I have one of the most disastrous and irresponsible financial pasts of anyone I've ever met.