Alive, I promise

So...

Yeah. It's been quiet around here.

It's not that I don't have a lot to say.

Really, for starters, let me be embarrassed that I didn't even stop in here to post something big and important (that you probably figured out, if you can do math, and that you probably figured out if you are on Facebook or have spent any time near me or my extended family in the last three months):

Welcome to the world, Samuel Tyler! 

(Err...welcome to having spent three months in this world already before your mom got around to posting anything about you here...)

Here is a quick photo timeline - brand new through three months:

Yeah. We think he's pretty adorable. I don't need to litter this blog with incessant baby talk; if you're curious about Sam, his birth story, and random tidbits month to month, feel free to get your baby fix over at Laughing with Sarah.

I'm a month into being back at work, and Sam hangs out here in the office with me every day. It makes for a very full existence. For good and for bad. :) For instance, I have a crying, angry baby on my lap right now, and he's full, and I just changed his diaper, so I really have no idea what is wrong. Which makes me frustrated. And crying baby does not equal amazing productivity. I spend most days alternating between entertaining him (and getting very little done), and then rejoicing when he falls asleep for a nap (and rushing to get as much done as possible in a one or two hour window).

Matt is teaching a course at Luther College this semester, in addition to his regular human resources consulting job out of Chicago, so he is just about as busy as I've ever seen him. Maybe as busy as he was in law school, even? But I hope that he's finding the opportunity fulfilling, and not just stressful. And maybe it will open new doors for the future!

Let's see. What else...

It's cold here. By "here," I don't think I mean Iowa. I think I mean the midwest. But either way, brr. Lots of days below zero. And lots of snow. Exactly what winter should be, in my estimation. But the icy roads and the inability to spend any time outside (lest my face fall off) are starting to get a little old. And so I've been drinking a lot of coffee and hot chocolate to keep warm. And cheating a little and wearing jeans to the office some weekdays, because it is just too cold for skirts or for flimsy dress pants.

I have all sorts of things I want to write about soon: thoughts on family, thoughts on community, thoughts about the spirituality of repetition and routine...so look for more writing on the horizon. Hopefully I can also find the time and energy and organization to start posting my sermons again, because it's nice to have them out and about beyond just the walls of the sanctuary.

Anyway, consider this post a re-entry. Life is busy, and finding uninterrupted time to write is tricky (Sam loves to be held, and I'm terrible at typing one-handed!), but writing is good for me. It is normalizing. It centers me. It keeps me connected.

So watch for more to come. I've missed it here.

Daylight Savings Time

I'm keeping warm with a scarf, a baby belly, and slippers.
My knitting sits on the coffee table, waiting patiently.
Emme claims the blanket on the end of the couch as her own.
This is what happens when the afternoon turns gray.

It is 3:34 p.m. here in Iowa.

I just turned on lights in the living room because it was getting dark. Hard to tell whether the darkness is due to last weekend's time change or whether it is due to a thick, gray mass of clouds that have settled in over the town.

It always takes me a few days to adjust to the time change in the fall. Mornings, instead of looking like dark nighttime, look instead like faintly-lit gray hazes that make you wonder whether it is morning or evening; early daytime or late-afternoon cloud cover. Afternoons turn dark sooner than expected, and night falls earlier, fooling you into thinking that the day has come and gone more quickly than you expected. It takes me a few days of this to settle into it, to get to a place where I don't feel so disoriented and unsure of the time and rhythm of the day.

And then, as I settle in, something switches in me, and I get it. I remember what winter is like, and I understand the new feel of the day, and I remember the parts of my own self that get tucked away when we spring our clocks forward in March.

In other lifetimes, I gave myself an October threshold for listening to Advent and Christmas music. These days, I hold out until at least the start of November. This year, for whatever reason, I didn't even start thinking about it until last week, when I started loading up playlists onto my iPod in preparation for labor and delivery later this month, and I programmed myself a copious amount of Christmas music for those forthcoming hours.

I forget that we've passed Halloween already, and that Thanksgiving is only a few weeks away. My usual rush to embrace autumn feelings and flavors has been a little slow this year.

Perhaps because while the seasons change around me, and the time changes, and the sun sets earlier in the afternoon, my mind is not on the seasons themselves, or on holidays or traditions or even the bits and pieces of nostalgia that late fall and early winter dig up in me.

For the whole span of time we've lived in Iowa, time has been pressing ahead toward only one thing: the birth of this much-loved, much-awaited hedgehog of a baby, whose due date is just two weeks away. Thanksgiving this year will either be a celebration of a very new newborn, or the last few days of a very very uncomfortable pregnant lady. Christmas feels like forever away, because something as big as HAVING A BABY needs to happen between now and then. The whole fall has been a time of talking about this eventual baby and making initial plans and preparations, except that we are now in the last days, and the things that needed to get done "sometime this fall" now need to get done today and this week and as soon as we can manage them.

Today, though, Daylight Savings Time finally caught up to me in a useful way. As I sat here on the couch, watching the grayness of the afternoon creep in through the windows, I felt this urge for something to happen. Tired of waiting, I felt ready for a holiday, or ready for some nostalgia. Ready to knit and make soup and do autumnal things. Ready to scoff a little less at the Thanksgiving and even Christmas commercials on TV. I am ready for something to happen. Ready to meet this baby, or to eat some stuffing, or to start sorting through the Christmas decorations that we might put up right after Thanksgiving with family members who will be coming to see us. I'm okay with the wind blowing outside, and with the fact that it might be time to pull out my winter coat, even if I can't zip it up right now. I am ready for something to happen. Babies, holidays, families, cozy nights, anything to reclaim a space for myself that is no longer a space of mere waiting, but a space of anticipation and joy and movement.

Maybe being nine months pregnant makes me a bit of a crazy-lady. Because I'm not sure how a gray afternoon can somehow make me excited rather than depressed. But maybe the weather just reminds me that the seasons are again changing, and that nothing actually stands still in life, and when the quiet of waiting starts to drive you a little nuts, even the world outside can remind you that change is always on the horizon, and those things that you've been waiting for will indeed come, and all the days that you've been counting will indeed lead to something new and interesting and beautiful.