Meaning: Elijah “The Lord is God” William “Resolute Protector”
Born September 26, 2007.
9 pounds 9.1 ounces.
21 inches long.
Beautiful. Simply beautiful.
Thank you for your prayers and thoughts over these past months.
Thank you.
Some have asked for an update as a result of my obvious silence here these past few days. We are now onto day four of “I think this is the night” for our little one to come, so that is what has been occupying me both mentally and physically of late. Thanks to all who are praying with us and for us, and we look forward to sharing good news soon!
This morning I took the kids to our local park to play, and it turned out two other moms from our church were there with their own kids, as well as my sister’s kids, so we ended up being quite the party! The park was almost completely deserted, which I have been told is actually a sign that it may not be a good time to be hanging out there (like maybe everyone else knows something that you don’t…) but we settled in for good swinging and running and sand-play.
The only other people who were in the park were two black youth sitting at a picnic table to one side of us, and at one point I realized that another man was walking very quickly toward us. There were a few cars around the perimeter of the park that had caught my eye because they had people standing next to them for the duration of our time there, and on my walk over there had been that sense that today was one of those days where the air felt just a bit more tense than normal. So when this guy started toward us, and then when he quickly grabbed the two guys next to us and they all hustled out of there, it caught my attention and I looked around and saw four other young men approaching on bikes.
The four guys parked their bikes a few feet from our play area, and settled in for a stay. So there we were, the three moms and six kids, and the otherwise empty park except for our new visitors. It was interesting to see the three of us react: Christie immediately started packing up sand toys; Jen started saying out loud to her son that it was time to go home for lunch; I likewise began picking up toys and getting my stroller packed up for the walk home. We never spoke of why we were all leaving, and to be honest it was close to lunchtime and we had all probably been planning to hit the road soon. But it was not accidental that our leaving was hastened by the others’ arrival.
Earlier we had all been talking, and I had asked Christie about the Mayor’s visit to her school (she’s a teacher) the day before. She told me that he had not actually shown up himself, but rather representatives from his office had come for the visit. The reason he had not come was that he was in a series of high-level meetings concerning a drive-by shooting this past week that had claimed the life of a twenty-three day old infant being pushed by his mother in a stroller. The baby’s murder took place just blocks from the hospital where we are due to give birth any time, and the baby was a random victim in a shooting that targeted a street vendor who had perhaps not payed his “tax” to the local gang for selling items on that corner.
And so it was with thoughts of that mom and that precious lost one that I left the park with tears stinging my eyes as I pushed my stroller away.
There is a new nightly ritual in the Haub household right now. Every night after dinner, we throw on shoes and socks and head out for an evening walk together. Typically, dinner is followed immediately by the bath and bed routine for the kids, but since one of the ways to help bring about labor is walking, we are uniting as a family to help encourage Baby Baby to make his/her appearance sooner than later (yes, the irony is great that after six weeks of solidarity in PREVENTING labor, we are now working for the other side).
During the day, I always take the double stroller anywhere that I go with the kiddos. Mercy is a great walker, but Aaron is just shy of trustworthy, and I am nowhere near able to manage a situation where I would have to pick up both kids. So we bring the stroller, and Mercy walks most of the time, riding only if/when necessary. But for these nightly walks, we are all on foot since Doug is in the picture, and it has proven to be delightful on many fronts.
It is great to see the level of engagement the kids have with their environment when they are not stuck in the stroller. They inspect everything, stop to talk to everyone, close gates, climb tree roots, stomp in puddles, and deal face to face with the many neighborhood dogs (Mercy will now walk past houses with dogs out front, and Aaron just stops and walks right up to the gate to say hi to even the meanest sounding pit bulls). They comment on the sunset, the airplanes and helicopters overhead, and the many ice cream trucks that are always out hovering at this time of night.
Because of all the starts and stops, it is probably more accurate to call our evening jaunts “meanderings” rather than walks. We take it slow, which this pregnant lady is perfectly fine with at the moment. While the exercise is not therefore very vigorous, our engagement with our neighborhood is. I feel like in the past week, I have had more conversations and interactions with my neighbors than perhaps at any other time. And we are doing it together as a family, which feels so much more meaningful than when we parcel off to do this or that ministry task. And because we go nightly, people expect to see us and greet us warmly when they do.
We are quite a spectacle to be sure: two platinum blonde toddlers, the tall white guy and the very pregnant woman making their nightly pilgrimage down Kenwood and Raymond. People stare and that is okay. We stare back and those stares turn into smiles and greetings and an increased sense of relationship with those around us. I can tell you now which families are always sitting outside in the evening; which kids from which houses play together in which yards; where the youth most like to gather and in what kinds of groupings, and which cars cruise around too fast.
Now, I walk around all the time in our neighborhood. But it is the pace of our nightly walks that seems to invite a much deeper level of interaction and reaction with others. I am not rushing over to my sisters or scrambling to get to Sunday worship remotely on time: we basically have nowhere we need to be, and nothing really feels like much of an interruption. This has made me think about basic pace of life issues and how little margin there usually is to just slow down and be present in a place or to spontaneously stop and talk to people, investigate tree roots or describe the sunset.
It also made me think about our church of very busy people wishing to be salt and light here in our community. How many evenings of meetings and strategizing events and conversations would simply be better spent on evening meanderings around our blocks.
No, our baby has not yet arrived, however twenty-one of the tiniest little baby Mollies have joined our fish tank family! Doug’s intuition on Saturday proved correct, and his decision to move the mama fish into the little separate breeding box meant that this time around, many more than one little baby fish survived. We have no idea what we will do with these little guys–we certainly can’t keep them all–but they are very fun to watch.
Doug informed me yesterday that for this breed of fish, one insemination can result in up to four “batches” of babies. Wow.
Love thy neighbor (except when parking)…
The street where we live is known for being the most crowded in the neighborhood: lots of people squished into lots of apartments, with lots of cars needing street parking. My sister won’t even come to my house in the evenings (she lived in this apartment before we did) because she says it is just too hard to find parking. Since we enjoy two parking spaces that are available to us behind our house we don’t feel the crunch for ourselves, but we certainly feel it for our guests and friends.
It has recently come to our attention that one of the families who lives next door to us in a four-plex has found their own solution to the parking issue. Every morning when the daughter and son leave for work in their big SUV, the Abuela comes out and moves her little sedan into the middle of the stretch of curb that lies in front of their building. With a driveway on one end and a stop sign on the other, her car sits, ALL DAY, as a little island along that curb. When the daughter and son return home, they call her from their cell phones and she comes out front and moves her car forward, thus creating two permanently-reserved parking spaces for their family.
It is maddening to come onto the street and see this big, unused stretch of curb with just under enough space on either side of the sedan to allow for any other car to park. And when you watch them morning after morning, the Abuela still in her nightgown, maneuvering their cars to own that curb, it can start to really annoy. The brother and sister are young, physically healthy, and they are driving what to me is a luxury vehicle. I think I would feel differently if someone was going to this effort to hold a parking space for an elderly or infirm family member. That would be much more understandable.
We don’t have a ton of other Christian neighbors on our street, but this family is one of the more vocal or prominent ones, which is what makes their ritual all the more annoying to me. But before I head too far down the road of my own self-righteousness, I should ask what the places are in my life where my own convenience or comfort has misplaced the gospel, for I am sure there are many. Where are the places of disconnect in my daily life between a verbal gospel and a lived one?
Okay, so tonight the novelty of mobility totally wore off. Somewhere between chasing down the kids to get shoes and socks on (after huffing and puffing and painfully contorting myself to put on my own), lugging the double stroller out from the back of the van while stuff crashed to the sidewalk, and doing my best to steer the stroller around various obstacles on the sidewalk, my joy over my freedom to once again move and walk and exert myself faded. And at the point where we stood, unable to move any further down Kenwood due to the two large barking pit-bulls who my terrified daughter refused to walk past (she was on foot at this point of our journey) ultimately requiring me lifting her up into my arms and carry her while pushing the double stroller with Aaron in it, I decided that life on the couch had not really been so bad.
It’s amazing how quickly our perspective can shift; how we can so easily recast our judgments of something.
Doug and I recently passed the five year mark of living in L.A. The year before we moved here, we fell into a friendship with a married couple from the Midwest. It was a random set of circumstances that brought them to Portland for three months, the fall that Doug and I got engaged, and they lived in my house for the duration of their stay. Those three months were filled with some of the most hilarious moments ever had with roommates, as well as times of deep conversation and surprising levels of intimacy considering the relatively short time we had together.
They are without question two of our favorite people, and so it was with great delight that we discovered that following spring that we would all be moving to L.A. that summer. They flew out for our wedding in Seattle and drove one of our cars down to L.A. so that she could start work immediately. He flew back to Chicago from there to pack up their things and then joined her a couple of weeks later. We showed up soon after he did, and we got together for dinner the first Friday night that we were all here. They had just rented an apartment in Santa Monica, and I distinctly remember sitting at their table talking about how friends can end up living in the same city and never seeing each other, and how we didn’t want to be those friends. And so we instituted “Friday Night Club”: dinner together every Friday night, no matter what. And so for five years, through babies and hospitalizations, church demands, professional obligations, school and job changes, we have honored that commitment (with occasional exceptions, of course). And because of it, we have managed to not become those “same city, never see each other” friends.
This past Saturday we did a “breakfast club” instead, followed by a great time at a nearby beach with the kiddos. While at the beach, we shared a specifically meaningful moment together. Back in the day when we all would muse together about ending up in L.A., we would talk about how fun it would be to share next life stages together, one of which would hopefully be having kids. One of our little mantras was that we would end up in L.A., we would both get pregnant at some point, and we would do yoga on the beach together. And so, with great struggle on my part (and graceful ease, on my friend’s), she and I stood in the sand on Saturday striking yoga poses together. My friends are expecting their first baby in January, and so it is that we enjoyed the fulfillment of a hope conceived years ago.
As many things as have gone not as planned for us here, I took in this moment with deep joy and contentment. And I was reminded again that, in spite of the risk and reality of disappointment and hardship, it is always good to hope and dream with those you love, even about something silly like yoga on the beach.
10. Walking into Mercy and Aaron’s room on Saturday morning and picking them up out of their beds.
9. Putting the toys away exactly the way I like them to be organized.
8. Doing laundry.
7. Dressing my kids.
6. Spending Saturday with best friends at the beach.
5. Going for a family walk down Kenwood on Saturday night.
4. Letting Doug sleep in on Sunday morning.
3. Worshiping with my Church of the Redeemer family and giving the welcome during the service.
2. Getting caught up with Servant Partners work.
1. Telling Mercy that no, mommy doesn’t need to lay down on the couch anymore…
Goodbye, bed-rest. Hello, Baby Baby. We can’t wait to meet you!