Prompting

I really hate to jump on bandwagons, but as you know, I'm having a hard time writing right now and in need of some major inspiration. So I've been searching the blogosphere, reading posts from friends and writers and trying to figure out what is it God's saying to me that he really wants me share with all of you.

Well, nothing. :)

So instead of that, I found on an acquaintance's blog another idea from another blog. The idea? Write about five years ago, in five minutes. Sounds easy enough, so here we go:



Five years ago, we had just announced the news we were pregnant with the girl. Baby #2. The long-awaited wished-for child. We had tried getting pregnant for a year, things got weird (I wrote about this in depth... the weird things would take longer than five minutes to go into), and then boom! Baby! Woot!

The getting pregnant coincided with me getting mono, so besides the constant nausea, the exhaustion kept me on the couch at all hours. The boy was just three at the time, and we were living at my mom's place because we thought at any minute God would send us away to Ireland (little did we know it would be another two years!), and I was just. so. tired. I'm ashamed to say that for the entirety of the first trimester, the vcr/dvd player was on non-stop and Barney and Bob the Tomato and Thomas the Train took care of Jackson while I cuddled him in my sleep on the couch.

But besides being tired and nauseous, I was happy(ish). I say "ish" because I really don't think I ever truly embrace the happiness when I'm actually in it. Afterwards I can say, "Oh, that was a happy time!" but I know, in truth, I probably found faults within that happiness that kept me from totally revelling in it. But I do remember being oh so grateful that there was life growing in me, that the life had lived on past week 6 and that the sickness meant I was still pregnant.

We didn't know yet that it was a girl, but we knew her name years before she came along, so I anxiously awaited the long-heralded arrival of a baby girl named Eleanor Cate. A little less than five years ago, we discovered it was, in fact, a girl. And a about 4 1/2 years ago, we met that sweet little baby nicknamed "Ella" by her big brother. It was the easiest labour of my life - which isn't actually saying much - and she was tiny with huge rosy cheeks and a head full of straight black hair.

She was a promise. I didn't know until five years ago when the second bright pink line appeared that this child was a promise. But she was. Now, she's a spit-fire and a handful and a question mark and a brightly coloured vision of perfect imperfection. Still a promise... I think she's a promise that my life will always be full of pink adventures.