Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Twins: Unexpected When You're Expecting


Once upon a time, not very long ago, we knew my wife was pregnant, but we didn't know we would be having twins. Assuming we would start parenthood with one child, we began to prepare, trying to get a head start on a few things during early pregnancy. Mostly, we began to sort through the junk in the guest room and in the office, both of which had devolved into junk rooms. I was hit by the urge to purge pretty hard. Having been a bit of a nomad throughout my childhood, I don't have as much stuff as most people, so thankfully I didn't have as much to get rid of. My wife however came from a stable family that has lived in the same house for nearly 20 years - and recently most of her stuff from there had arrived at our house.

Anyways! We purged a lot. We're still working on that. I moved furniture around so the guest bedroom could serve as an office also. It was a nice set up. Both Alison and I liked it better than we had before. The former office, though the smaller of the two small rooms, would serve our baby nicely enough.

Then we found that we weren't having a baby. We were having two babies. A couple days after the shock began to wear off, I realized that there was no way we were going to be able to fit a second crib into the already planned to be rather sparsely furnished bedroom we had chosen for the baby. There was just no way. The other bedroom though, we could fir two cribs into. Just barely, when you add a changing table, a dresser, and a chair for rocking and nursing.

"These kids are already causing twice as much work!" I exclaimed.

And I went back upstairs and starting swapping furniture from one room to the other. A work still in progress since we are going to have to sacrifice a few more pieces of furniture than we had planned to do previously.

We anticipated having a baby, but not twins, of course. So many people these days seem to think that every child must be planned, but even when you plan to conceive, twins, at least when conceived the old-fashioned way, are surprises. They are unplanned. Twins are God's way of reminding us that He is in charge and our plans are not always His plans, but that His plans are better.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

This Is My Blood

Many pro-lifers are familiar with the eerie similarity between Christ's words at the Last Supper, when He instituted the Eucharist, and said, "This is my body," and the cry of the pro-abortion advocate "It's my body." It has been remarked upon many times.

Today I was thinking about this, and then I thought of the next words Christ said, "This is my blood," and I thought of this:

My children are my blood. They have "drank of my blood" (taken my DNA) to have life within them.

It made me think of how every time a woman justifying abortion says "This my body," there is also a man who could say, "This is my blood."