Day 2

Premature birth is when a baby is born before 37 weeks of pregnancy; a typical pregnancy lasts 40 weeks.

Day 1

Today, more than 1,400 babies in the United States will be born prematurely. More newborns die from premature birth than any other cause.

Prematurity Awareness Month

November is Prematurity Awareness Month. And for the next two weeks the March of Dimes is pulling out all the stops.

So I'm going to post each and every day. They're going to be short. Basically just facts about prematurity. But I hope that it will remind each of us, at least for the next two weeks, about the fight so many babies fight every day.

If you want to see/take part in the activities March of Dimes has planned for the next two weeks, go to marchofdimes.com/fightforpreemies.

And November 17 is Prematurity Awareness Day and purple is the color of March of Dimes. So if you feel called, wear purple that day and let everyone see that you're thinking of preemies.

NASCAR & A Deep Thought

This past weekend Doug got free tickets to the Amp Energy 500 at Talladega Superspeedway. He's been trying to convince me to go to a race for quite some time but being out in all that heat just didn't appeal to me. Well, with free tickets and the cool weather of November, how could I say no?

We did have a lot of fun so maybe I'll let Doug take me back someday.

Now on to another subject. Doug and I are reading Crazy Love with Bloom. Every week they do chapter review videos. And this week they mentioned something that blew me away. Their pastor said a couple of weeks ago that the phrase "God never gives you more than you can handle" is NOT in the Bible. The pastor said that God does put us in situations over and over again that we can't handle without Him. But each and every one of those situations forces us to turn to Him and have faith in Him. WOW... I'm just going to keep thinking about that for a little while longer.

And while I'm thinking about having faith, I'm also thinking about the faith that Stellan and his family are being forced to have right now. Stellan and his mother are going to Boston today and most likely Stellan will be having surgery on Tuesday. Please keep them in your prayers.

Random Recipes & the Death of a Monkey

My sister moved in with Doug and I the day we got married. And she's a little picky about what she eats. So for the past 3 years, I've been cooking pretty much exactly the same things week after week. Now that she's engaged, she eats at her fiance's house every night, so I decided to do a little something different.

I was given several cookbooks when we got married. So last week I went though each cookbook and picked out the recipes that I thought sounded edible. I wrote down the name of each recipe on a slip of paper and put all the slips in a big bowl.


Then we drew one out and ate this for dinner.



And it was actually pretty good! I'm learning a lot already. For example, oleo is really just margarine. And this week we're going to be having Hamburger Stew.

Now, about the monkey. When Doug and I buy dog toys, we never know which ones are going to be loved to death and which ones are going to be ignored. A few weeks ago we bought this monkey for the dogs.

It got destroyed very quickly. And Doug swore that it was my sister's dog that did the destroying. Which was believable, because she LOVES to destroy squeaky toys. So we bought a second monkey since they loved the first one so much.

And now we have photographic proof of the violence:

Levi, who has earned the nickname The Beast because of his size, is now The Destroyer as well!

Challenges of Faith

I'm sort of afraid of heights.

So this was a BIG deal for me.

My life A few of my never-broken bones were completely relying on a rope and some nylon strips to remain unbroken.

If you're not afraid of heights this little obstacle course I ventured on recently probably seems like no big deal. But for me it was a challenge.

The obstacle course consisted of three levels of various obstacles separated by little platforms. On the first two levels you got to choose which of two obstacles you wanted to tackle, one considered "easy", the other hard. The third level consisted of all of the hard obstacles from the lower two levels and you didn't get to choose, you had to complete them all.

I didn't do the third level.

But it got me thinking about faith in general and faith in God. Here's how I see it. When God created us, he tied an invisble rope to us that binds us to him until we go back Home. We can't see the string so sometimes it's hard to believe it's really there. But it IS there, and it's a really thick rope. Just like on the obstacle course, oftentimes we get to choose the "easy or hard" path. We have rest points throughout our journey. And if we DO stumble and fall, that thick rope holds us up. It protects us from broken bones.

And our faith is challenged every single day. Sometimes you feel yourself start to fall and you think the rope must not be there because you're falling so far. But in the end, the rope always catches us. And it always will.

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day

I just wanted to remind everyone that today is Oct. 15th, Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day. If you have been touched by the loss of a child, please light a candle for that little angel at 7pm. If you're lighting a candle, comment on this post so I can see who is participating.