Sam and Anna

Sunday, August 17, 2008

miscellaneous shots

this was late one night, when she was awake, naughty and whiny. so sam decided to take a picture...the flash made her legs buckle and her head fly back like she got shot. it was quite funny, and terribly pathetic. i felt so bad for her.

just starting to hold her head up. 2 months and something days old.

wearing daddy's boxers.

at wit's end. life is just too hard.

that's her ho-hum-yes-everyone's-being-an-idiot-again-trying-to-make-me-smile face.

Monday, August 4, 2008

Happy Birthday Mama Maria

Celebrating the birthday of a true queen mother to many children (and grandchildren) around the world. This was Dava's video for her on behalf of all of us.

(And yes, I know I cut her hair waay too short...but it grows :)

Friday, August 1, 2008

of prayer and miracles...

This post is long overdue. But, like they always say -- "they" ALWAYS say...who are "they" anyway??? No matter...that's beside the point -- the point is prayer and miracles, and any post on that is better late than never <-- that's what they always say.
Anyway, on with it...

So, Liney (lie-nee: Dava's made up name that we definitely were NOT gonna call her, but which she ended up being called anyway)...so...Liney...her birth was quite the miracle in the first place. Any birth is. I do believe it's called the miracle of life. But a home delivery in 1 hour with no tearing is, as someone put it, "about as good as it gets".
There seemed to be no complications or problems except that for the first couple of days her eyes would get watery when she cried, but then they cleared up right away. Then after a week or so, it came back, just in one eye...all gucky and yucky and green and goopy, crying or no crying, just yucky and gucky.
We tried to keep it clean, but it didn't seem like it was going away. So, in started coming the "maybe you should take her to a pediatrician" suggestions. I could visualize the pediatrician predicting doom and destruction for her little baby eye. I definitely didn't wanna take her in to find out it was the symptoms of the beginning of some lifelong ailment. So that evening instead of singing in the shower (I don't sing in the shower, by the way) I thought about some way out of this pediatrician predicament, and then a light bulb turned on in my brain: "Put God on the spot."
Now, I had been praying for her eye. We had both (Sam and I) been praying for her eye. But we never really put God on the spot. And now I was gonna. I decided that the next day I would pray for her eye every hour, and then, if by the day after that it wasn't cleared, then we would go to the pediatrician. I told Sam, and he agreed to the idea.
"The next day" came, and by the end of it I was crestfallen. Not because her eye hadn't cleared up, but because I had forgotten to pray every hour. So I prayed with all the fervency and earnestness of all the previous hours I should've prayed...and then waited for "the day after".
By the end of "the day after" I realized I had, again, kinda forgotten about her eye situation. (We were very busy at this time, with a lot on our minds. It's not an excuse...it's just fact. Okay...it's a little bit of an excuse.) That evening I looked at Liney's eye and then asked Sam, "Have you cleaned her eye today?" He told me he hadn't. Neither had I. Her eye looked very much almost completely cleared up, except she had what looked like a tiny little bit of "sleep" in it.
The day after that...it was clear...and has been clear until now. The eye-guck is bye-bye and prayer came to stay. It is my first course of action for everything.
Prayer works. Miracles happen.