Elisabeth Grace 4 years ago

from the vault:

Feb 1st 2010

Catherine and I are about to embark on the greatest adventure of our lives. We are going to be parents.

I remember the day we went in for the ultra sound. After seeing the insides of our baby, it’s beating heart inside it’s small chest, it’s bones and spine all lit up on the screen, it’s tiny feet and tiny toes and tiny hands all curled up in front of it’s tiny face. We were then told we were looking at our little girl.

Of course Catherine always thought of “it” as a little girl and remarked about how it would have taken the remaining months of pregnancy to cope with “it” being a boy… if it were.

As we were walking out of the hospital I told Catherine that I would now have to come to terms with “it” being a girl. I told her, “Well, I suppose I will just have to take my little girl hunting and fishing, camping and canoeing, and teach her how to spear things.”

Catherine laughed hysterically as she said, “You don’t spear anything!” Well, it’s never too late to start I suppose. I had recently been watching man vs. wild in which Bear Grills teaches how to survive in the wilderness spearing fish and so forth. In one episode Bear Grilles is slogging through a bog in Ireland to retrieve a dead sheep. After wrestling it free he ate its raw heart and rolled its skin inside out for a bloody sleeping bag.

Twenty minutes later over dinner I had coped. In truth I was a bit concerned about having to teach my little boy a trade to make a living. This concerned me because I don’t know if music ministry really qualifies as a trade.

Girls, I realized, need to be taught how to be a good wife, if she decided to marry and this was something Catherine could teach her just fine. But then this got me to thinking about her future husband. I can’t believe I’m already worrying about her future husband. When I talked to Catherine about all this, she said to me, “What are you talking about a trade for, were you born in the 1800’s?”

Elisabeth Grace is now seven months along. She flips around in mommies belly and enjoys kicking daddy in the face when he tries to listen to her heartbeat. It’s hard to believe or even imagine how our lives will change in just a few short months.

Honestly, the world actually seems like a much safer place to me knowing that there are so many other parents out there. It’s odd but I already feel a sense of community with other parents.

I think about Ellie alot. I think about all the exciting books we will read together like C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and all the adventures we will have… like spearing things.