Seven of the last eight pregnancies have not ended with a baby in our arms. They’ve ended with tears and sadness and a bitter tasting cup to drink. We have not gotten to hear those hearts beat. Not heard the cries of a newborn. A laugh, a first word–all outside of even my dreams.

It may be too early today. We may have to wait to know. Like I wait right now for them to call me in to possibly know nothing new.

I long right now to hear that patPATpatpat of the quick fetal hearttones- faster than even my old out of shape heart is on a treadmill. It is a beautiful sound- I know this because I can remember what it sounded like roughly two years ago when we sat in a room not knowing if we were going to get a baby after six consecutive miscarriages.

And there it was: Margary’s heartbeat. A sound of certain life that brought tears to our eyes. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a moment on this earth where a sound was that sweet.

And now I long once more, another child gone to be with God last October, to hear those sweet beats of a tiny tiny heart.

Yesterday, though, I realized something. While I cannot imagine a sweeter sound than those heartbeats right now, there is a sweeter sound that goes beyond my imagination that I know I will hear. And that is the voice of Jesus. It will be a sweeter sound than these earthly ears have ever heard as He welcomes me Home.

They called me in and there it is. A little sac in TC’s uterus. Inside? Our baby. And then there it was. a blinking pulse from there in the sac.

“Are there speakers?”

And she turned them on and I heard a sound that still leaves tears of joy in my eyes. That sound we’ve prayed to hear for the last two weeks. That sweet, sweet sound of a baby’s heart.

Thank You, Lord Jesus. Thank you! I praise Your name for this sweet sweet sound of a tiny heart in a tiny child. Thank you.

“Holy, holy Lord God Almighty!
“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain!
“Highest praises, honor and glory
“Be unto Your Name!”

We’ve never miscarried after hearing the heartbeat- but many women do. Please do stay in prayer for our little one.

We’ve chosen a good Calvinist pet name for this little one: baby Lucky. We hope he will be number seven in our home- arriving sometime around Thanksgiving, making that a sweet, sweet day of thanks for us.

1. family worship. We had a great month at family worship, including worshiping with some guests at our house and a couple of times via speaker-phone while I was one the road. Still not where we want it to be but a great start to the year.
2. Exercising. I almost didn’t make this one this month. With the help of my wife’s prodding and encouragement, though, I managed to hit the gym (and hotel exercise room) 8 of the last 10 days of the month to get in my 10 (see journal here).
3. Reading. No real start here.
4. Writing. As you can see from the posts here I have a long way to go on this.
5. Hospitality. We’ve got a good start on the year, and are making appointments. We already had one family over we’ve never had to the house.
6. Family time. I took two vacation days this month to be at home with the family. A decent start, but not on pace for 33 for the year quite.

Not too bad of a start…more updates coming about once a month or two.

This year, though, I’m going to try again. And by God’s grace, these should be attainable.

1. Be more consistent in my time with family worship than last year. I ended 2008 much better than it began, but there is still room for improvement. I want to not only be more consistent but more deliberate in how the time is spent, so that the children (and the adults!) get more out of it and it’s not just a routine.
2. Be more consistent in my exercising. I had some good months in 2008, and it was certainly better than 2007, but I want to get in at least 10 workouts *every month* in 2009. It’s an attainable goal. More is better, but I want to hit it every month rather than 20 in January and then miss March.
3. Read twelve books. I’ve pared down my blog reading of late, and may continue to purge my RSS feeds. I thought about having this be “read one book every month” but I would rather just get some books read. I may do better than twelve, but my reading habits have been poor in 2008 and so I want to just finish a few more books this year.
4. More writing. Not necessarily blog posts, but I want to do more writing than I did last year. Including letter writing–I want to get back to sitting down with a pen and paper and write people I don’t usually communicate with, and to do it outside of the quick, painless email system. I know I should have something concrete here, but I don’t know what I want to set as a realistic goal.
5. More hospitality. I’ve used my travel schedule as an excuse for not having people over so much this last year, but I want to have at least 10 families over for dinner this year that we’ve never had over before, or at least who haven’t been in my home since 2006.
6. More time with the family. As of January 1, I have 30 days of vacation time and 38 days of personal time. I would like to actually take some of that off this year and use more vacation time for personal use than I did last year. It may be hard around travel, but it needs to be a priority and I’ll have to do a better job of delegating so that it can happen. So concretely, the goal is to start next year with fewer vacation days saved up than this year, by at least 5. That means I need to take off at least 33 days this year. Seems like that should be easy, but it won’t.

I think these are reasonable goals, but the year will show me. I’ll try to post updates as to how I’m doing on all six of these every month or so.

(written June/July, 2002)

Bon Voyage T.o.D.

My wife began bleeding today. There are many times in our marriage that this has happened for many different reasons-but this is only the second of this one. In contrast from the first time-we knew this was coming.

Something wasn’t right-that’s what she told me over the phone only weeks ago. She was having cramping and had passed some mucus-either one of which wouldn’t have alarmed her-but together they came and she had a feeling something was wrong.

It had been about eight weeks since she was late and we took a test. There’s the line! Another baby! What joy we had at knowing that God had chosen to bless this unlikely pair with another child.

We went to the wrong doctor’s office. We didn’t mean to-there was an OB/Midwife group in the same building, with the same address, one upstairs, one downstairs. We didn’t know any better and waited downstairs for over an hour before the mistake was realized.

A midwife came back to work on a sunny day. It was after 3:30 and it was perfect outside for enjoying God’s world. Not too hot-not too humid. And she came back to work. The upstairs nurse was a gem-a real kindred spirit. She laughed and joked with us-this was our seventh pregnancy in as many years.

Out came the Doppler. No heartbeat could be found. No worries, they told us-it’s not rare at twelve weeks to not be able to locate the baby with the Doppler. We’ll sneak back and give you a free ultrasound.

My wife’s uterus measured just right for a 12 week pregnancy. But the sack was empty-no heartbeat, no baby. Something was wrong-my wife’s intuition was correct. What could it be? Is the baby gone? Did we do something wrong?

We had to come back tomorrow. The trained ultrasound technician would be necessary to have an internal sonogram. That would show for sure what was going on inside my wife. Not to worry-the midwife who performed the ultrasound wasn’t a trained expert and might have missed something. Go, have some blood taken at the lab and then come back tomorrow afternoon.

Friday. Nothing. A blighted ovum, the doctor said. No embryo from the conception. No baby. We were happy to know that there was no baby-no miscarriage. But the doctor was wrong. A blighted ovum is a conception-it is a child.

We found out that some blighted ovums, or those diagnosed as such, eventually grow into a long-term pregnancy. We held out hope that our child would be spared and that God would let us meet him.

Today my wife started bleeding. We knew it would happen soon-but we had hoped it wouldn’t. In the back of our minds we knew that our baby was dead-but we hoped yet that God would spare him. God can bring back a child from the dead-we know that-and God can show mercy as He wishes.

Theodore-that means a gift from God. That is the boy’s name my wife had selected. Danielle if he were a she. Theodore or Danielle. T.o.D. We’ve named all of our children before they were born-from our first (MoZ-for Moriah or Zechariah).

Funny how life works sometimes. Certainly our God is good and knows beyond our greatest wisdom. As I was typing the above more than two weeks ago my wife called to me from the bathroom. The bleeding had increased. She then proceeded to pass out. We called the midwife who said to head to the hospital.

We were sad, of course. We still are. We’ve lost a child before-and though it is somewhat easier to adjust this time having gone through it once already, it still hurts a whole bunch to lose a child.

Simeon. Simeon or Anna. Those were the names we’d picked out for the child we lost in 1999. That one was much harder. We’d just moved from South Carolina to Illinois where we knew no one. My grandmother had just died causing me to leave my wife and children for a funeral in Colorado. That was the first time we’d spent two nights in a row apart since we’d been married almost four years before. And then came the call from work-that she’d had spotting.

We barely knew anyone from church-only having been here a couple of months. People pitched in to watch the kids while we went to the doctor-and then to the hospital. It was a bad experience checking in that time-my wife was bleeding out a miscarriage and they seemed to be most concerned about getting our billing information down. So much for the only pro-life hospital in town. Theresa spent the night in the hospital and I came home to a baby-sitter I’d barely met and my children. I got back to the hospital early the next day and she was discharged. The hospital was so-so and the doctors were nothing to write home about-and so we chose not to use either again.

This time the hospital experience started out great and went downhill quickly. The ER nurses were fantastic. No wasting time with paperwork-and I was never asked to leave my wife’s side. The downhill part is mostly due to primadonna doctors. They tried to get us to sign a release form without talking to us first. The anesthesiologist was visibly perturbed at having to come all the way to the 7th floor on a Saturday for a consultation before the surgery. Our latest doctor (his last service) was incommunicative and elitist as he pretended to care for us. So much for the health-don’t-care-industry.

The neatest part about this miscarriage is the way God took care of us through it. When Theresa passed out we had ‘houseguests.’ I put that word in quotes because as of the next day we were moving out and they were renting our home. Because they were there in God’s providence, I didn’t have to call an ambulance and I was able to be with my wife during this difficult time. The next morning we had one friend who showed up early (she answered her phone at 10:30 the night before) to watch the children, and another friend who answered the call at 6:30 AM to oversee our move.

It’s a strange Saturday when people show up to help someone move and the people who are moving don’t. It’s truly amazing to me when I think of how well God took care of us that weekend. We closed on our new house on Friday morning, planted the beans and tomatoes in the new yard that afternoon, and went to the emergency room that night. On Saturday while I was attending to my wife men and women who we didn’t see got most of our stuff loaded into a truck (after unloading the new renters’ things into the house) and over to our new house. When we got home in the evening that day sure most of our stuff was in the garage, but Theresa’s mattress was made up and ready to sleep on and I had no problem finding what I needed to get the kids to bed.

The next day three men (on Father’s Day mind you!) showed up after church and helped me move all of the big items into the house from the garage, into the proper rooms, and put together all of the beds. As of 48 hours after the beginning of the final stages of the miscarriage there was nothing in our garage that I couldn’t lift myself other than what we’d planned on storing there already.

I think it’s easier this time for another reason. Since we’ve lost another covenant child before we have some confidence that ToD is enjoying playing with Simeon or Anna. In the presence of Jesus Himself. We miss both of these children that so many will meet before we do-and we long for the day when we too will be with the Lord and finally fellowship with them. God, for His wise eternal purposes, has spared these children of my poor fathering and the hardships of this sinful world and has chosen to keep them to Himself. Though I miss my children-I’ve long since learned that arguing with God never works.

It’s 5:00 now. I couldn’t sleep tonight for whatever reason-between asthma and allergies and other things. So I finished this. I’m glad it got saved before we left for the hospital. I would never have remembered to finish it otherwise.

I hope that you can see a bit of my life in this struggle and know me better. I know that I have been able to know God more through what He has brought us through. Please join with me in wishing T.o.D. a hearty bon voyage. I know he’s already at his destination and probably has been there for some time (can you say that someone’s been in eternity for some time?) but I never finished saying good-bye.

Good bye ToD. Rest well with Jesus. The tears in my eyes right now won’t be there when you meet me-that will be after Jesus has wiped away all my tears like He’s already done for you. I don’t have to wish that God will be with you until we meet again-He’s with you in a way I can’t fully understand yet. Good bye my child. I loved you imperfectly during the short time you were here and I will love you still forever, one day perfectly with His love. We will miss having known you but we know that you are better off and that our loving God has planned this for our good. Enjoy playing with your brother or sister-we’ll be there soon to enjoy you both.

You know, it’s funny. Not ha ha funny, but weird funny. I don’t think I ever grieved until now over to. Something about my ‘inspector gadget’ personality I guess that I didn’t grieve until I did it at a computer. It was just Monday morning when I finally set it up. Life changes quickly. Peter is now one and soon he’ll be walking and talking. As close together as our children are we’ve never really had a time without a baby. We had actually prayed before conceiving to that God would give Theresa a short respite between number 5 and 6. There was a time when we might have been tempted to be resentful at the conception-and that ended right before we found out TC was pregnant. We were able to rejoice whole-heartedly in the news of the new child coming.

Now we’ll have that space we prayed for before between children. Sure it’ll still likely be small compared to most people we know. All right all the people we know. But we were rejoicing in the new face we’d be seeing later this year. And we’re still sad that we won’t be able to look into that face until after we see Jesus’ face-but we know that it won’t hurt at all then. It’s just kind of weird to think about the house without a baby.

Toby is finally getting potty-trained, and Elsie is close on his heels. For the first time since 1997 we may have only one child in diapers. I got married in 1995. If you had told me then that we’d have five plus years with two or more children in diapers, with most of the time being three-I’d have said you were crazy or walked away from the marriage, I’m not sure which. In hindsight I so often am glad that God doesn’t tell us in advance what our decisions are bringing in His providence. There are so many things I would have done differently if I’d known then what I know now. But I wouldn’t know Christ the way I do had I not gone through all of those difficulties I so wanted to avoid.

I’m sure this is another time like that. A time I wish I didn’t have to go through-the loss of a child and the adjustment to that reality. But a time in which God is cultivating His Spirit’s fruit in my life. A time aimed as all times are-at making us more like Christ.

Bon voyage, ToD. We’ll not forget you. We’ll see you soon.

Marquette Heights, IL
July 2002

It is a new era.

Today was my first birthday since starting a facebook account. And because I was non-private enough (I did consider this btw) to allow my birthday to be “public” for my facebook friends, they all knew.

And so today my wall on facebook was plastered with birthday greetings from people around the world who I know, most of whom I’ve actually met IRL.

This is a blessing, to be sure. Facebook (and other tools like it) can allow us to be more involved in the lives of people we see infrequently. I have been glad for the reminders of birthdays, all of which never would have made it into my MS Outlook Calendar. I have been glad for the opportunities to wish well to friends that I don’t see (as far away as Korea!) well on the anniversary of his/her birth.

I am also glad that not all of my FB friends (not to be confused with my *real life* friends, though there is significant crossover) wished me happy birthday. At that point it would have felt like FB greetings on the birthday is somehow socially obligatory, which would make all of the greetings I received worth less somehow.

Technology can be a wonderful thing, used wisely. I pray that I will learn greater wisdom in my own use of it as I enter my 40th year.

To those of you, my wife and family especially, that made this a wonderful day: thank you. I do appreciate it. It is nice to be loved, and nice on those occasions where that love is most felt.

Last night I got back from Chicago, where I spent most of the week hobknobbing with the rich & famous, by which I mean elected officials and people who make more than I do. It is very good to be home. Despite the close location of the conference, this is the longest I’ve been away from my family this year. And for that I am thankful. Later this month, dv, I’ll post a summary of this year’s travels and a comparison to last year.

I’ve been exercising again, getting 10 cardio workouts in last month (compared to 7 for the previous 3 months combined) and I already hit the fitness center at the hotel yesterday, starting August out right. Lord willing, I will see some increase in healthiness and energy levels over the next few months if I can continue forming this habit.

The children are growing. I’m amazed at how grown up they’re getting. We talk about the Bill of Rights, taxes, future plans. I am thankful that my children will be spared from some of my mistakes because I see them learning what I didn’t.

Later this month, Toby and I will be headed to GenConIndy, for his 10 year old trip. I’m looking forward to the time with Toby, and his enjoyment of the gaming environment.

If you’re on facebook, look me up. I’ve been uploading photos there from my blackberry and you’ll get to see a bit more since I haven’t figured out a quick way to do photos here.

More later!

And this is the first post of July. Umm….yeah.

I’ve been busy, but not really too busy to blog. I’m going to try to do better, but I’m not making any promises. I will say that don’t count on any pictures other than the ones in the top of the blog—that takes too long to make a post and I’m giving up on it, at least for now.

I stopped working out for a while. I missed two straight months. But I’ve gotten 5 workouts in the last 8 days: four at the gym and one in a hotel room. I’m praying that is a new pattern, rather than a break of the badness back to the badness.

We had another trip. We visited my sister in Ohio for my niece’s graduation party. Then stopped briefly in Erie (thanks Adiel!) and on to visit my great aunt in Rochester, NY. She had some family tree news that we enjoyed and my kids got to meet her again (not since 2001 have they seen her). (Grandpa Lansberry’s father’s sister) We had a lunch and a chat and then headed on to New Hampshire, stopping for a late supper in Bennington, VT.

We stayed in a cabin at the newly purchased Woodbound Inn with my sister and her family. During the day I helped out at Cindy & Aylmer’s new place of residence which is still a few week’s from being ready to move into. The inn is beautiful and we’re hoping to get back sometime soon. It was nice to see it—and the high point of the trip, as usual, was dinner at Aylmer’s Grille. (soon to relocate to the inn).

Saturday after that we travelled to TC ’s grandma’s house and spent a few days there, including a long morning picking up old fence in the weeds. Then back to Sandy’s for a night and to a meeting near Cincinnati, OH, which included a day at the creation museum.

It was good to be home.

And then TC and I went last week for a couple of days to Atlanta and now I’m back in town for a whole week. Sometime I’ll post the year to date travel numbers. Still pretty light.

More to come sometime—including some writing projects in the work. For today, though, this is it.

Last month we went to visit my Mom’s cousin in Nevada, MO (passing though the famous Louisiana/Mexico corridor) for a few days. After that, I had a trip to Hot Spring, AR, followed by a few days in Branson, MO, including a two day trip to Silver Dollar City. It was a nice trip.

Mom and Dad came with us to SDC, and then came up to Peoria for a few days where Dad helped build some bookshelves in our library. Maybe TC will post pictures later, but I’ve decided that if I start posting pictures I’ll never get posts done again. But they look really nice–you can come by and see them if you’re in the neighborhood.

This week, Danco is installing air conditioning. Upstairs and downstairs. That ought to take the crimp out of hospitality this summer. We’re looking forward to it.

Last week and next week I had/have short trips to the east coast. It keeps me busy.

I haven’t been to the gym in several weeks. Bad me. I really would like to start that up again, but it’s just hard to get back over the initial inertial hump.

That’s about it. Lots of life surrounding this. I had delusions about posting individual posts about the stuff above, but don’t think it would have happened.

More later, Lord willing.

January – March, 2007: 10,746 miles traveled and 15 nights away from home.

January – March, 2008: 2,466 miles and two nights away from home.

Wahoo. I have trips scheduled every month through September, but with that kind of a start I’m happy to report that it seems unlikely to catch last year. Whew.

The place is in the former Big Easy Cafe location, around the corner from Rhodell’s and next to Rizzi’s on State, across the way from WTVP. It’s owned by the same owners as the Mackinaw Valley Vineyard, and should be a good investment for them to get their wines better known in the area. Between us all we tried seven different wines, and TC and I left with a bottle of Alexander’s Conquest, a lovely full-bodied red that I’m looking forward to popping open the next time we have a heavy beef meal. We also shared a piece of their Italian Cream Cake that was just fantastic to eat, especially on the heels of the flight of white wines, before starting into the reds. Seth and Crystal had a scone and I heard no complaints.

Because we were the only table there for a while, the manager spent a good deal of time talking with us and we got the whole story. The place hasn’t been opened long, and I’m pretty sure we’ll become regulars there before too long. Like many of the places on the river, they’ve used the warehouse architecture for their benefit, rather than covering up what used to be there. They have a couple of private rooms that could be used for meetings or parties (small ones). I’ve added them to my Peoria Links section of the sidebar and we will certainly be back!