Baby Clare

Clare Olivia Tippett
Born at home on July 8, 2008
8 pounds, 10 ounces

July Baby

It looks like our new little one will be a July baby. We've been having fun looking at all the feast days and birthdays of friends and family to help us with middle names for the baby but they keep passing by and we keep looking forward a few more days..........

My mom has been blogging about us again. I appreciate her grandmotherly perspective on our last prenatal visit. We are planning another home water birth and I'm blessed to have my own sister-in-law from next door as my primary midwife accompanied by the same midwife who attended our other 5 births. Reading my mom's post refreshed my perspective and reminded me of just how fortunate I am.

Aliou just realized that the new baby will be white and not black. Most of the babies he's seen were in Liberia so I think he was expecting a sweet little black new baby like all the ones in his memory.

Since the children have been mostly caught up on chores (chores go so much faster when we're just maintaining all the nesting work!) I've had many little sessions of working alone on things in a quiet house while everyone plays outside. It's much easier to pray through my work at these times and I've been offering most of my prayers for little Baby Joe. Join me in offering a prayer for him and his family.

The things I've been meaning to blog about.........

We've been busy taking advantage of summertime opportunities before the baby comes. We're at a rare stage in life. Our family consists of 7 children under 14yo and NONE IN DIAPERS! This makes us fairly mobile. There is no one screaming on little road trips because they can't understand why they are strapped in a carseat instead of being held in my arms. Everyone can change their own clothes and walk next to me in the store. So we've been on the go and when we come home it is to sleep and catch up on chores. Good thing someone else is blogging about us. Check out Leon and Aliou's 1 year anniversary post by my mom here. And my due-date status here.

Being a Bandaid

Wow! I'm borrowing the following from someone who borrowed it from another adoptive parent's blog:
"It is easy to sink into the bliss of being an adoptive parent - but it is important to always remember that the bliss comes at great expense - often the heartbreak of a birth parent left without options, or the hopelessness of a child's prospects in their broken birth country, or the death-knell of an incurable disease, or the ramifications of poverty on a small life.

Adoption is not the answer - it is a band-aid and it is absolutely necessary, but something needs to be done about the problems - poverty, disease, war, racism, economic disparity - that leave children in this chasm.

It is imperative that those of us who walk down this road vow to always engage ourselves in solving the bigger problems - the very problems that brought our children home to us. Find an organization that is addressing these problems and send your money, give your time, advocate on their behalf."

It's so easy to feel that "I'm doing my part" by just fixing the next meal and comforting the next owie and being the parent that Leon and Aliou need for the rest of my life. Really that feels all consuming at times! But I love a challenge like this to look beyond my little world to see how I might keep trying to make a difference at the root of the problems that brought them to us. My main calling is to be a band-aid but I don't want to limit myself and my family to only that.

Pictures!

For some reason I can no longer put captions under each picture. My Blogger adviser isn't due for a visit until mid-summer so I'll comment on all the pictures down here.

First is our Little Flowers/Blue Knights Clubs end of year BBQ. Can you find the 5 Tippett kids in the picture?

From there we usually go to Costco. It's an hour from home so we do big shopping and Trader Joes shopping and the Catholic store shopping, etc. All things we don't have at home. Here we are shopping with only 5 kids. Yes they look lively but they were very good shoppers that day. They are getting better all the time!

Next is a top secret card-making session headed by Anna Mae for Gianna's First Holy Communion tomorrow. God willing I'll have some lovely photos of that to share soon.

And I just had to share the picture of my favorite book-end given to me by my mother-in-law. It is symbolic of my recent decluttering efforts since I usually have been unable to use book ends because the book shelves are usually too stuffed. Ahhh how refreshing is open space - on the bookshelf and everywhere!!

36 weeks

I had grand plans to document this pregnancy here with weekly photos. Now here I am with less than 4 weeks until my due date. I hope you can see what I've been doing with my free time instead of blogging. Here I stand with my largest load yet ready to be donated to St. Vincent de Paul on our trip out of town to our Little Flowers/Blue Knights clubs. I just love the recreational decluttering that comes with the last 5 or 6 months of pregnancy. I was hoping that adoption would trigger the same thing in me but it didn't. So with our current baby already 3 1/2 and with 7 children ages 13 and under in the house - well this intense nesting was LONG over due.

I've been wanting to read It's All Too Much but I've been too busy aggressively purging to read a book about it. And though I love systems and plans I've found that other peoples systems and plans only "work" for while and are harder to follow through with. I better save that book for the next clutter slump and make the most of this passionate nesting while I can.

Proud Parents

August ran his first 10K race today. We we are so proud of him and he had quite the cheering squad at the finish line with all our little kids there. Maybe I'm especially proud since I'm completely non-athletic and marvel at athletic talent. It's also neat to watch the talent skip a generation as my parents were runners. (My mom marveled at sewing skipping a generation from her mother to me.)

Grand-daddy, my dad, is sponsoring August in all the local runs this year. Today he came in second for his age group of 12 and 13 year olds. It's exciting to watch him make strategies for improving his time with hopes for a marathon down the road when he is fully grown.