I'm Almost Out of a Job!

Chris was not only here for Noble's birth, he was able to take leave! It was a wonderful time for our family. He cooked yummy food and even yummier cookies. He gets more talented by the day! What would I do without my super hero husband? Sure, I can have a baby by myself without him, but we don't get spoiled with shish kebobs and chocolate chip cookies. Is there anything that goes better than home-made cookies and raw milk? Nope.

Even better than the food was the way Chris took care of the children while I took it easy and babymooned with Noble. He drove the kids to endless soccer practices and games. And 4-H shooting practices and tournament. And nary a complaint! Talk about super hockey moms all you want...we've got the world's best soccer dad in the world. He knows how to get into the games without paying! Definitely a man after my own heart. :)

Some have asked us how Noah is adjusting to a new baby in the house. He's not shown a hint of being deposed. Nor jealousy either. The reason most likely is because Chris has cultivated such a beautiful relationship with Noah. Since he came home from the last deployment, he has bathed and read to Noah before putting him to bed every night. Some nights they put each other to sleep. Before you think I am putting too much on Chris, he absolutely loves their bedtime ritual. When Noah falls asleep before Chris can read to him, we have a sad father in our house.

I appreciate my husband very much. That just doesn't cut it.

I believe God has given my husband to me to show me a little bit of how sweet heaven will be.

I love you, Christopher. With all my heart.

Noble's Tree

Today we went out and got a tree to plant with Noble's placenta. We thought it would be kind of neat to have a tree that is part of him and can signify the new birth that we have been blessed with. It is a Japanese Red Maple. We thought it would be just very nice to come home and see it and be reminded of how blessed we are to have him, or to just sit on the front porch and watch it grow as he does.

Thank you for your prayers

We are so very blessed to have family and friends who truly love us and care about us. Thank you for all your prayers.

Thank you, Heritage Bible Fellowship, for the support you've given us. We are grateful for all the meals...AND the flowers!

Yes, labor is hard. Oh, but the rewards...

Not only do we have a precious little one to love, we are lavished with felicitations.

The children said during a meal that was made by a friend from church, "Having a baby is so nice!"

Children say the truest things.

Our big news

Noble Lynn Richter was born Sept 1, at 11:04 am. He came into this world a whopping (for us) 8 lbs 7 1/2 oz. We are just so happy to finally be able to hold him. To God be the glory.

This HAS to be it!

These contractions feel different than the ones I had last week. They are definitely more uncomfortable. I've been getting the contractions all day, but they really started being more steady after I went to bed. I've been praying that the baby would be in the right position. I feel that the baby may be posterior. I don't think the baby's bottom is facing me and I still feel lots of kicks.

The kids kept on asking to be woken up if I go into labor tonight. I'd like for them to sleep as much as possible and then wake them up just before the baby is born. I'd love for even Noah to be there. He's been talking about the baby for quite some time now and I think it would be such an exciting event for him.

Poor Chris...he really wanted to have the birth be during the day. I think if I do go into active labor tonight, that it would be for the best. Night time is so peaceful and more calming than the day for me.

Between contractions, the baby is super active. I wonder why. Maybe the baby senses something is up?

I asked Lucas to be the official birth photographer. He is really looking forward to the job.

This one is a pretty big one. But I can still type, so that's good. :)

I was hoping that we'd have the baby in August, but September will be just fine, too. Our birthdays are concentrated between March and July.

Chris puts Noah to sleep so easily and sweetly. Noah asked to take a shower with Chris and then they snuggled in bed while Chris read to Noah. Then Noah just climbs into his crib and goes right to sleep! With me, he asks for more and more books and then he does not want to go into his crib. Each child really is such a gift. I look at them and wonder how I could love them so much and how perfect each one is. But of course, there are times, way too many times, when I don't love them. I think of how God loves me and I am so humbled and grateful that He is God and His love never wavers.

It's so wonderful to be able to share our birth plans with folks at church and know that many are completely accepting and supportive because they homebirth, too! Someone asked if I was still having contractions after church and prayed with me right then and there. That's offering support that counts! I am so thrilled that a friend who is expecting her third child is really interested in a homebirth! It's interesting how many families at our church are like-minded in the areas of homeschooling and homebirthing. Everything seems to be coming home!

My mother called yesterday. It was very nice of her. She was at a church retreat but still thought of me. She told me that she had her babies 2 weeks before her due dates. I didn't know that. I wonder if mothers didn't share much about their pregnancies and labors with their daughters because they were unpleasant experiences or if some mothers just tended to be more private about their lives. Maybe it's just a generational kind of a thing.

Hana and Grace both want to homebirth, of course. They know that women do go to hospitals to give birth, but they see first hand how good and natural it is at home that it's obvious to them that home is where the baby should be born. I hope the boys will be able to influence their future wives to consider homebirthing as well. It doesn't take much propaganda on my part to convince them that the medical establishment need not be involved with childbirth.

Women used to give birth at home. Then their daughters started going to hospitals. I wonder what caused the break in tradition. Is there a period of time when mothers stopped passing down their wisdom and experiences? I'm sure it occurs in non-Christian homes as well as Christian homes. Why did daughters start leaving the home for work when their mothers didn't? Why did they seek others to care for their children when their mothers didn't? At the boys' soccer game on Saturday, I talked with a mother who told me that she has 3 children attending the Christian school that our boys' team was playing against and as soon as her 3 year old is potty trained, he will be going to the school as well. I wanted to ask her why, but didn't. I guess I just feel sad that families are missing out. And at such young ages. Maybe it comes down to fathers and mothers who aren't the ones really raising their children anymore and so the children grow up with the flow of the culture and adapt to whatever they see around them, instead of their parents' ways. We pray that sheltering our children and discipling them ourselves daily will reap godly consequences and "that our sons may be as plants grown up in their youth; that our daughters may be as corner stones, polished after the similitude of a palace." Psalm 144:12

This fall, Lucas and I have begun playing soccer on a homeschool team called the Fayetteville Crusaders. Our team is rather varied. It's supposed to be a varsity team, but we have high school students, junior high students, middle school students, and even an 11-year-old.
That fact is somewhat unfortunate for us, as many of the other high school teams have only large players. However, although some of our players are new (and quite a few could "use some improvement," to say the least, we have several very good players at the same time.
Our coach, noticing the aptitude a new player that recently joined the team has for being keeper (goalie), decided to start training him as keeper and put him in the goal so our official goalie could play as a midfielder.
As the new goalie, who is known as "Big Pete" or simply Pete to avoid confusion with Peter ("Little Peter," the 11-year-old), is quite inexperienced since he has never played soccer before (he plays football), it's been somewhat of a gamble to take our seasoned keeper out from the goal and put him up front. It's given mixed results, as he's let in several shots that our veteran goalie could probably have blocked, but then having Kyle, our experienced goalie up and try to score helps tremendously, as long as the ball stays on the other teams' side of the field.

Our first game of the season was on Tuesday the 19th of this month.
The opposing team, Fayetteville Christian School, (which is pretty much the best team in the league) has many skilled players, many of them large, and we didn't play as well as we could have, the game ended at 8-0. We did manage to hold them at eight points for around 40 minutes, though. In that game Kyle was still playing as keeper. I believe that if he hadn't been, the score would have been more like 80-0, because he blocked quite a few good shots.
Our coach put Pete in the goal at literally the last minute, and he caught one ball.
He joked afterward that he didn't let any shots go in the goal.

The second game was against a school called Lee Christian School on Friday the 22nd.
Thankfully, the weather was much cooler and wasn't like the blazing heat we'd had to suffer during the FCS game. The players on this team are nowhere near as experienced as the FCS players, but they had some incredibly large guys on their team (the captain looked like he was around 6'6"), and once again our team failed to play anywhere near to its potential.
Kyle was out of town, so we didn't have him there to help.
However, we did score the first point, but that didn't prevent us from losing 7-1.
Our coach said the entire team wasn't going to the ball, and one of her favorite sayings is this:
"We can't win unless we have the ball!"

The good news is that we didn't continue the pattern we had started, or it would have gone like this: 8-0, 7-1, 6-2, 5-3, 4-4, 3-5, etc.
If that had happened, it would have taken us five more games after the first to win a game.
But that pattern was broken yesterday, on Monday the 25th, in the game against
Northwood Temple Academy.
Kyle was back from Virginia, but Pete continued to play keeper. In the first half, we scored the first point, but although Pete missed several shots, I blame myself rather than him, since I was a defender and shouldn't have let the player with the ball get past me to score. Anyway, we don't blame the goalie unless he misses a really easy shot (especially if it's from a long way off or is going slowly), because most of the time, to get up close enough to score, a player has to go through ten players trying to defend the goal.
In the first half, our team played better than we had the last game, but still not extremely well, and Northwood led 3-1 at the end of the first half. But in the second half, pretty much everyone on our team started to play better, and even the worst player on the team managed to get in the way of the opposing player with the ball and stop him for a second, and then someone on our team got the ball. That event in itself was a historical event, as he is always outran and beaten.
We scored several more points, and even though Kyle kicked the ball over the goal a whole bunch of times, we actually led 5-4 for some time. Unfortunately, the other team scored another goal and so the game ended in a tie, 5-5.
Coach Cindy was ecstatic, however, shouting "Yeah! We didn't lose!"
I was somewhat puzzled by that because we didn't win, but I must admit, it was very good not to have lost.
And that's all I have about our soccer season at the moment.

Up Again With Contractions

It's Monday, Aug. 25, 1:16 am and I cannot sleep because the contractions keep on coming. 37 weeks and 5 days...16 more days to go. I think tonight would be a really good day to give birth.

We went walking tonight. I felt a lot of pressure. I'd like to walk more until the baby is born. I think the baby is a girl. Just because. I don't think I'm as big as I got with Noah. But then, I think I went almost to 40 weeks with Noah. We have a girl's name finally. I had been asking Chris what he thought about the name for awhile. He is ok with it and picked the middle name right away. We've had a boy's name from the start. If the baby is a boy, I think it would be so nice for Noah. If the baby is a girl, of course the girls would be thrilled. Me, too. But I'll be thrilled with a boy, too. I think I learned my lesson from Noah's pregnancy. I really believed that he would a girl and just didn't even think about the possibility of a boy. When he was born and I saw that he was a boy, I knew he was everything that I wanted. All thoughts of girls instantly vanished. God gives us so much better than what we want for ourselves.