What's the Plan?...by Liimu

"Would I plant your feet on an unsecured ladder? Its supports may be hidden,
but if I have asked you to step up, then surely I have secured the ladder."

That was sent to me by a friend of mine, excerpted from Messages from God. It's such an important idea - that when God (or whatever you believe in) makes a path available to you, why would you doubt that it's the right path?

When I found out I was pregnant, I told a friend of mine and she was so worried for me. "You've only recently gotten your finances under control," she said, "and you have a hard time managing with the three you have." Not sure what she expected me to do - I was married with three kids who had been begging for a baby brother for years. What am I, gonna go to Planned Parenthood and "take care of it?" Let's not even talk about the fact that my husband had been saying for months that he had a feeling someone was missing from our family and that maybe we should have one more.

I didn't say any of that to her. I told her, "We weren't doing fertility drugs, charting ovulation or even really paying attention to when we were having sex. Clearly this is God's plan and in my experience, God doesn't come up with half a plan. He doesn't drop something like this in your lap and then go, 'Oh, but good luck with affording it - that's on you.' I'm not saying that doesn't happen to people, but it doesn't usually happen to me. Usually, when God throws a curve ball it's because He has a much better plan than the plan I came up with and if I just go with it, He takes care of whatever pieces of the plan I can't handle. That's just my experience. If God felt we were to be blessed with another baby, I'm quite sure he's going to help us figure out how to manage and pay for raising him."

And sure enough, my consulting business is now booming, and I'm experiencing my best year ever. I'm having fun doing what I love to do, and I'm making more than enough money to afford this new addition to our family. Fortunate, because my husband just got laid off.

I know what you may be thinking - oh CRAP, and you just had a baby! No, no, no - don't feel sorry for us. This is a BLESSING! Before I got pregnant, I had told my husband this was HIS year. My business is in its fourth successful year. I can confidently say it is a successful venture. Now it's his turn. He has been in a job he hated for 14 years - time for him to live his dream of owning his own music studio and arranging and producing our music, as well as the music of other up and coming artists.

A couple weeks before he got laid off, we ran into a friend of my husband's (best man at our wedding, in fact) whom he had not talked to for nearly two years. We were playing tennis and he just happened to live right behind the courts. As it turns out, he need someone to help him run his sound company - perfect opportunity. Then, the day before he got the news of his layoff, he landed his first client - a woman from Buffalo commissioned him to write 3 songs for her. The funny thing is, I think God knew that even with all that Universal affirmation, Glen might get cold feet about pulling the plug on his day job. So, the layoff was the nudge he might have needed to run his music company full time. That's what I like to think, anyway.

I have a friend who's having a baby today. Like me, she's a scheduled C-section, underline "SCHEDULED." I got to the hospital at 12:00 pm and she was still waiting. When she was finally ushered back at 2:30 (her C-section was originally scheduled for 1 pm), we had spent two and a half hours chatting, laughing, generally relaxing her and getting her excited to meet her daughter. The first thing I said when I saw her was, "We make plans, God laughs." The only thing we can do is laugh right along with Him.

Have you laughed today?

And Then There Was...The 2nd Trimester...by Liimu

Ahhh...the 2nd trimester! Cue Disney music...

After more than two months of feeling like I should be living in a dark cave, with my husband throwing food outside the entrance for me to slither out and devour every 90 minutes, I finally feel like a human being once more. I wish I could say that I am now running 4 miles 5 days a week, but let's not push our luck, shall we not?

I have to say that God sure does know what He is doing, because my resurgence of energy and feeling human times perfectly with my life getting INSANE. I won't even touch on the fact that work has ramped up to an unprecedented level of busy-ness. It's a good busy, so it feels almost blasphemous to complain about it. (Plus, it's going to pay for the bouquets of flowers I intend to send to myself in the hospital in advance of my scheduled c-section so that for this last baby, I have the experience of having a room full of flowers that I've sort of secretly always wanted.)

The other thing that's suddenly happening is that our family has gone from watching on the sidelines (pun intended) as our friends shuttled their kids here, there and everywhere all fall to having a ton of activities happening in what feels like 18 different directions. Devon begins winter swim on Monday - practice 5 days a week and weekend swim meets - and our not-quite-four year old is actually really good at and really enjoying soccer. We had always promised ourselves that we wouldn't push them into doing any activities, but that if they showed a true interest in something we would support them and strongly encourage them to pursue it. Autumn has been kicking the ball around all summer with dad and is settling into soccer like the game was invented for her. The funny thing is that I have friends who's kids are already on traveling teams, my sister's three kids have all been playing soccer for years, and it has seemed like a staple of suburban parenthood that our family was just not going to experience. Just goes to show that kids are different. My three kids have very different interests and what works for one definitely does not work for the others. Still trying to figure out what the middle one is into (other than singing and monologuing in the mirror).

A hectic pace, a frenetic schedule, but through it all I am somehow managing to stay in flow. Just this morning I got a meeting cancellation that freed me up to take care of some other work-related activities that I had been trying to figure out how I was going to complete. I swear, for the past three days I have felt like there was a mixed up Rubik's cube in my head and then today it's like someone just took a paintbrush to all the different sides and it is now miraculously solved. It's flowing like that.

Speaking of Being in Flow, someone asked me when I told her I was pregnant how I was going to manage a fourth kid - "It's so expensive and you complain now about the logistics of the kids you already have!"

I said to her, "In my experience, God doesn't come up with HALF a plan."

My thought for the week...there is a God and it ain't ME!!! Hope you'll tune in next week for all the Week 14 FUN!!!

The Whole Plan (aka Week 11) by Liimu

One more week to go and I'm out of the first trimester. I have to say, I have never freaked out as much in early pregnancy as I did this time around. I still was not successful in waiting until the end of the first trimester to tell people (obviously, as I'm telling the entire world a la this blog), but that doesn't mean I wasn't nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs for the first few weeks I knew.

The amazing thing is that I got comfort from the most unexpected places. Friends I thought would have been at least happy for me, at most supportive and comforting, added to my anxiety by asking questions like, "Are you sure you can afford this?" and "Aren't you overwhelmed already? How will you manage a fourth child?" My response to that question was, "Look - we didn't push the issue of getting pregnant again. We left it in God's hands. God doesn't usually come up with half a plan." I'm not an overly religious person, but I do believe in a Power greater than myself. My husband and I had agreed that if it wasn't meant to be for us to have a fourth child, that would be fine with us. If it was, God was going to just have to make it happen (which He/She did). I have a feeling that's the way all the rest of it will work out. It just will.

One of the places I got the most comfort, which I never would have expected, was from my mother. My mother always gave me the impression that she didn't want more than two children. (I'm number five, so you can imagine how that sat with me upon first knowledge.) When I got pregnant with number three, I distinctly remember her response as being fairly underwhelmed. So, I was very nervous about telling her about this fourth blessing. I talked to my sister, Claudia, about it - my best friend - and she encouraged me to give her a chance, to give a little warning, but assume she could rise to the challenge. That's exactly what I did.

Not only did she rise to the challenge, but when I shared with her my fears of miscarrying, she put them all to rest by reminding me that I had to stop thinking of the worst case scenario and remember that I had already had three healthy, uneventful pregnancies. "Your body knows how to do this," she reminded me, "and stressing about it is about the only thing you could do at this point to confuse it."

My midwife was equally unconcerned, though perhaps not as directly reassuring. I don't know that she knew how freaked out I was, that I checked the paper every time I went to the bathroom (I still do, actually - sorry if that's TMI). I combed the Internet for any information I could find on miscarriage symptoms or statistics and didn't stop until I saw the one that said that once you've had multiple healthy pregnancies, your chances go down to less than 4%. And once you've seen the heartbeat (which we have) they go down to less than 1%. And as much as I can't stand the weight gain, nausea, dry heaves, sore boobs, acne and fatigue, I still welcome each symptom as a sign of a healthy, developing baby inside.

But the bottom line is that I need to remember my own words to my friend: God has the whole plan. And that means that if the plan is for this child to be born into our happy, welcoming, loving family, it will. And that's up to God, who...last time I checked...I am not.

Until next week!

Who I'm Not -- by Liimu

I’m not God. I can’t possibly control all that happens in my world, and I’ve long since given up trying. I’ve known many women and marriages that have broken down over a woman’s futile attempts at maintaining control and some unattainable level of perfection at all times and in all areas. I know a woman who spent her entire career working to be the top dog in her field, until she realized that no amount of money could repair the damage caused by neglecting her husband and kids for nearly twenty years. I know another woman who spent fifteen years spending all her energy trying to be the perfect mom, then woke up one day to find her children about to leave the nest and a man laying next to her in bed she hardly recognized.

I am crazy busy. Anyone who knows me knows that. Bless Robin for including me in this website knowing that fact, but I guess it’s because she also knows that I try very hard not to make commitments unless I fully intend to keep them. If asked where my first priority lies, they might be surprised to know that it’s not actually to my children. It’s to God, and finding ways to best serve Him, and following that, to myself. Because what I have learned is that if I neglect myself or my spiritual life, I am really no good to my children and husband. I’m cranky, irritable, ungrateful, self-centered and just downright yucky to be around. My husband said to me once when I was in one of these moods, “You need to do whatever you need to do to get re-centered. When you’re miserable, everyone in this family is miserable.”

So, I no longer try to be all things to all people. I start with getting connected to God and to being me, the best me I can be, and everything I do is to support one of those two goals. I usually start the day by running or going to the gym for a good workout. (When people ask me how I have time to run, I explain that I multitask. When I’m asked to go out for coffee or drinks, I always ask if we can get together to run instead. That way, I’m combining catching up with a good friend with my never-ending quest for health and fitness. My spiritual tank ends up twice as full!) Today, I ran three miles with a friend at 6 am, and was feeling pretty good about things. I worked for a few hours, and got some excellent feedback on my performance so I was feeling really jazzed. Then at about a quarter to 4, I got all freaked out when I checked our bank account online. I knew I didn’t want to pick up the girls in that state – I try hard not to raise them with the same sense of financial insecurity I grew up with – so I called my sponsor to get some support.

My sponsor told me a story from a recent production of Cinderella she saw. She said in the story, Cinderella asks her fairy godmother if she can go to the ball. She tells her fairy godmother how badly she wants to go and how disappointed she is not to have the right dress to wear or a way to get there. Then she says, “Well, I guess I could borrow my mother’s dress and catch a ride to the ball. I don’t really have to go in a fancy carriage in a fancy dress.” And of course then the fairy godmother grants her the wish, but in this version of the story she says it’s because Cinderella is willing to do everything she can to make her own dreams come true. That opens the door for the Universe to do the rest. “So,” my friend of more than 15 years then said to me, pausing only to breathe deeply (which, in turn, prompted me to do the same), “have you done everything you can do to make your dreams come true?” “I don’t know!” I cried. “Yes,” she assured me. “Yes, you have. Now, just go outside into your beautiful backyard for ten minutes before you pick up those girls and give thanks for all you have. Because just for today, it’s enough. You are enough.”

So, I did. I sat on the patio in the middle of my park-like backyard which, now that Spring has sprung, is bursting with color thanks to the flowers that are in bloom in the grass, the trees and the bushes. I sat there and looked around and then I looked up and said, “I’m sorry for doubting You. Thank You, God. Thank You for taking such good care of me. I promise, I trust You.” And before I knew it, it was time to go pick up my girls.

As I walked down the driveway to meet the bus, my phone rang. I looked at the caller ID and saw that it was a colleague of mine who has been helping me secure project work consistently since the beginning of the year. He was calling to tell me that a resource they had assigned to an upcoming project had backed out and he wanted to know if I was interested in taking it. I smiled to the Heavens and said another silent “thank You” to the God of my understanding, who was – yet again – reminding me that there is a God, and it isn’t me.