Waiting for a little lady

Speaking about my family of origin, the Jeffers family, we aren't huge advocates of being on time. I guess it's not that we don't enjoy it, it's more that we're unable to do it. Some kids win perfect attendance awards in school, I won the "late most days to school" award. I have proudly carried on our tardy tradition throughout my own adulthood and walk in late to most events in my life with my head held high. I once heard some TV therapist say that people who are late are attention seeking. I certainly hope that's not the case.

  

But if that IS the case, then Miss Wilma (not her real name necessarily) Cox is a very attention seeking person! 7 days...and counting since as I type this I don't feel the foggiest bit close to going into labor! That's a long time to be late. I tend to err on the 5-15 minutes kind of lateness, so 7 days is a little extreme even for me. The other day my husband and I (and when I say husband and I, I mean me) contemplated talking in British accents until I went into labor to perhaps convince her that we are much cooler people than she might think that we are. I mean, wouldn't it be cool to think that you're being born to a family of internationals? For some reason Matthew didn't really go for this, so we have been talking normally. For the most part.

But we have been doing some very fun things to prepare for Baby Girl Cox's arrival. Things like getting a GIRL's room ready!

 When we first found out we were pregnant we decided we weren't going to go "over the top" with a room. We decided to do "something easy"- like not painting all four walls. Hmmm. I'm not sure if what we did falls into the category of that exact expectation. Well, I take that back. All we had to do was

• pick a damask stencil out of hundreds of cute ones with the perfect dimensions and design that we were looking for
• go to Lowe's 4 times to pick out the correct swatches of paint that would accent the current room colors since we didn't want to be too "complicated" and paint the four walls that were already painted
• once the stencil arrived perfectly diagram the walls so that it would look completely random and asymmetrical
• carefully select how we would pick each color of our finally decided on palate to be represented on the wall so that no color was repeated in too close a proximity to it's color counterpart
• paint each color grouping so that after each grouping was finished we could clean off the stencil, wait for it to dry and to it again with the next color- except for any stencil that we thought might be a partial which we had to save to do last, but again in color groupings due to the fact that we wanted to save money and only buy one stencil
• find a perfectly matching bedding that would perfectly go with the colors that we chose specifically because they were "non-traditional" girl room colors.

Whew. I'm so glad we chose to simplify our lives. HOWEVER we are VERY happy with our baby girl room and can't wait to bring Miss Wilma home to it if she ever decides to come see us.  

Another way that we have prepared for our baby girl is have immortalized the pregnancy in professional photography fashion. For this project we chose our friend Melinda Hunley with MelHun Photography. Melinda is one of those completely annoying people that is good at all of the cool things in life, is a wonderful mama, finds the time to work out...and always has her hair done by 7:15 am.  One of the things that she's good at is photograhy, so she captured our little family on a day we thought was narrowing closer and closer to our little girl's arrival. 

And finally, when we're not going to the grocery store "for the last time" or trying for the one millionth time to get the house clean (we've given up on that one, by the way)..or repacking our hospital bag because we actually had to wear all of the clothes that we had already packed..we're just enjoying our last few days as a family of three by:

Hanging out on the birthing ball

 teaching Gavin how to cook

 eatting as messily as we possibly can

 playing our little bracket name game 

 

and knowing that God is the Giver of all good gifts, our Maker and our Sustainer...and when with every passing moment, you're wondering if this is the day that could change your life forever, knowing those things are good enough...even for two late ladies like Wilma and her mama.