I’ve been posting much less these past few weeks. Not a surprise; life gets busy, and I’ve been pretty tired.

So has Jaimie; she saw the doctor for a pregnancy test, got some bloodwork done, and found out she’s anemic from the pregnancy.

Combine that with an offhand comment by a coworker, and some pieces of my life snapped together. For a decade or so, I’ve had an incredibly hard time staying awake when I’m bored. It started in 8th grade, and has continued ever since. Boring class? Sleep. Boring sermon? Sleep. Boring workday? Struggling not to fall asleep. I was notably anemic back when I had mono – common enough, but possibly still true.

We’re going to start by upping our iron intake with foods. (More hamburgers and other red meat? Yes, please!)

If that doesn’t do the trick, I’ll be headed in to see a doctor.

In other news, Baby Girl is getting kind of huge, and still kicking up a storm. It’s pretty amazing to be able to see the effects on Jaimie’s skin as our little one kicks and stretches and pushes. I continue to be amazed at the whole process. It is, I think, the single most mind-boggling natural event in the world. From Jaimie and me comes an entirely new person. That’s hard to get my head around. She will have her own likes and dislikes, her own personality (and a strong one, if her parents are any indication), her own dreams and desires, and her own quirks (more than a few, if her parents are any indication).

There will be ways she is like Jaimie and me. She’ll probably look something like a combination of us, though I think it’s fair to hope she looks more like Jaimie than me. The vagaries of genetics being what they are, she could end up being a green-eyed redhead, though, and wouldn’t that be amusing? The probabilities, of course, lean toward a brown-eyed brunette, and if she takes after her mother she’ll be beautiful.

More and more I’m aware of how great our responsibility to her is and will be; but more and more I’m also aware of how much is and will be out of our hands. We can’t keep her safe, even now; she’s in God’s hands. The same will be true from the moment of her birth, forever. Nor can we guarantee she’ll come to Christ; nothing in our power will make that happen. Only God can save people. The more the thought of our little girl’s life looms large in my mind, the more I fall back on the assurance of God’s sovereignty in salvation.

Other fun tidbits: Jaimie and I did the ridiculous (and wonderful) last week in going to a midnight release of a beloved video game, and playing it throughout the rest of the week. Mass Effect 3 is 99% pure brilliance, and we profoundly enjoyed the experience, though that 1% was such a headscratcher as to mar it and leave us talking for days in annoyance. Amusingly, my Xbox 360 died as I was about to start the very final section (last 15 minutes) of the game, and had to be replaced. Alas.

I’m now working through Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman, and finding it to be simultaneously fascinating and tragic. Two features of the book have particularly caught my attention: the extravagance with which Russian royalty lived in the mid 1700s, especially in contrast to the Russian serfdom; and how readily our culture’s obsession with happiness infiltrates our views of marriage, in that it is easy to see Catherine the Great’s many affairs as justifiable in the context of her idiotic and boorish husband. (I’ll post on both of these at greater length in a book response at Ardent Fidelity when I’ve finished the book.)

I’m increasingly bemused by my love of history. As I began to recognize while taking a World War II history class at OU, I love history. Indeed, the various history classes I took tied with classical Greek as the classes I found most purely fun in college; only one physics class is in the same tier. More and more, the books I enjoy reading most are history, from biographies to studies of battles to historical sociolinguistics. All of it fascinates me. Considering the job prospects of people graduating with history and classical language degrees, it’s probably best I didn’t discover this passion until later.

A physics degree has been more profitable in opening various doors for me, and I don’t regret it for a moment. I loved the way it taught me to approach problems and to think hard about the world, and I’ve no doubt God will continue to use that education in surprising ways throughout my life. I do wonder that I didn’t realize earlier how much more I enjoyed history, though. Then again, I didn’t come to discover how much I loved web design until around the time I was graduating, and it appears that will be one major way I work to get through seminary. God’s timing, it is clear, is not ours.

We’re now a little under two months away from the predicted arrival of our baby girl, and only a little over four months away from heading to Southeastern. Lots of changing coming up very quickly…

P.S. It is good to write. Good for my soul. I always forget that; I need to remember it.