Cookies and Remembering

My entire house smells of sugar cookies and homemade butter cream icing. Yummy. I hope it airs out before dusk or some friends might come to have a cookie. The bears are extra hungry this year with the dryness and lack of berries and nuts. They are prepping for hibernation and have to pack in an extra 20,000 calories a day. This was a news story last night on the evening news so I have learned much.

Friday is little Isabel Faith's tenth birthday--- hence the cookies for her class tomorrow. They are only in school two days this week because of literacy testing. So... the birthday celebration starts on Tuesday for a Friday birthday. That sounds about right. She has always done things in a drawn out and dramatic fashion.

She was deemed "incompatible with life" at shortly after nineteen weeks into my pregnancy. I was encouraged (pushed really) to terminate. I was encouraged at every high risk visit-- every week. I would get myself together and be feeling positive and peaceful then I had to go to the doctor and would hear the same bleak forecast and cry all the hour drive home. She was wild in my womb-- flipping and kicking and hiccuping. I came to the peace that for some reason I was blessed to have this little girl in my uterus and to watch her grow and feel her life-- even if only for a season.

She was obviously not "incompatible with life". She was born early in a dramatic emergent fashion, but she screamed the loudest most beautiful scream for me to hear before being handed off to the NICU team. She was perfect-- just early. The doctors could not explain it. We were overwhelmed with thankfulness and with gratitude. The Lord had chosen either to fix what was wrong, or the docs were extraordinarily wrong on many accounts. We look back and see so many good things that came from those horrible few months. It was a defining moment for me. I was a different woman in August than I had been in May. That's how those things are--- for better or for worse, you are never the same.

I have an incredible story to tell Isabel every year on her birthday. She loves to see the pictures of her three pound self in the plastic box and the countless sonogram pictures we had from those awful weekly appointments. She knows she is here for a reason. We know that the outcome didn't have to be a good one. It is only by grace that she was fine--- others were not. It is an overwhelming and humbling thing to ponder why we were so blessed. God has greater thoughts than we do and all I know is that she is here and healthy and she is here for a reason. I struggled with many things in my heart those long months, but I came through stronger and with a new peace. I can't believe it has been ten years-- a decade of looking daily at that little face and remembering her story and the One who carried me through.

Daniel 3:17-18 "If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up." ( This was the verse I held dear every day of the pregnancy from 19 weeks to almost 33 when she was born.)