I saw God today...

I saw God today in the face of my brand new nephew. Henry Steven James Vallee was born last night at 8:56pm. He weighed in at 8lbs, 13oz and is 21" long (he may have lost a few ounces overnight, but I doubt he lost any height - even though Kailin one time shrunk between Dr. appts...). Although he had to be, in the words of my sister (his mom), "evicted" after failing to vacate after his assigned move out date of April 19 (and after, according to her, paying rent only through that date) he is a precious little boy whom I know will delight us all and amaze us with all the places he will go in life. I'll post some pictures of him here as soon as I get the go ahead from my sister.

I also saw God yesterday - a LOT. Remember that word problem I gave you all? Well the answer is that all will go well and the mother will actually not be driven crazy at any rate because apparently unbeknownst to me or anyone else the underslept 2.5 year old and the surprisingly awake 14 month old cancel each other out and the three of them will have a very pleasurable outing to Target. To TARGET. My intention was to go to Target and then run to Kohl's to do a couple of returns and then head home. As we were leaving Target, it began to sprinkle.

My first thought was "Scrap Kohls. Why press your luck with the kids and now it's raining." My second thought was "What are you teaching your kids if you run home and hole up every time it rains a little?" I should've gone with the first thought.

My ability to hear anything on the radio during a car ride is significantly impeded by my daughter's need to ask a running stream of questions anytime we enter a vehicle and/or her need to listen to songs from Curious George incessantly. Such was apparently the case when they were announcing that a MONSOON was due to arrive...oooh....about the time we were comfortably tooling about in Kohls. It was raining harder than I ever thought possible and we watched water pooling in the parking lot of Kohls as we stood forlornly near the exit. I've never felt so powerless to do anything but nothing. Alone, there was no way for me to get the car without leaving the kids, and no way I was going out in the pelting, driving, SHEETING rain with Colby on my hip and trying to drag poor Kailin along behind me at a pace I'm sure her little legs couldn't match. Thankfully, it finally let up a bit and we made a break for it. Kailin found it entirely silly that we were wet and Colby found it silly that Kailin was silly, so it all ended with us giggling and laughing in the car. (That's a nice ending, isn't it? I won't include the part after that where I called my husband to see if our basement needed bailing (it didn't, thankfully) and begged him to have peanut butter and jelly ready to go for the kids when I got home because the silliness turned into some not so slight testiness (really, I can't blame them - we'd skipped morning snack and it was almost noon by the time we got home.)) Getting back to my subject line, though, I was truly marveling at the fury of that storm and what a huge contrast it was from the weather when we arrived at Target just an hour or so earlier. God's power is amazing!!

Anyone who knows me knows that I adore God's creatures. Almost all of them. I'm not too keen on frogs. They can exist - but I prefer when they exist away from me. I love to hear them chirping away in the spring, but at a distance. I'm also not so keen on worms. I don't mind angle worms. Once they're big and fat and have that weird collar thing, I'm out. I'm generally someone who saves the worms stranded on the sidewalk before they dry out in the sun, but the plethora of (in my opinion) disgustingly large night crawlers I found under our garage door yesterday morning was almost too much to handle. One was crawling on the driveway and I bravely asked Kailin if she wanted to touch it. She yelled "NO!!!!" and I was secretly delighted. Well that had nothing on my experience last night.

I went out with a friend of mine yesterday afternoon and was headed home on a rural highway around 10 (sounds like the lead in for a horror film, doesn't it?). Another barrage of monsoons had struck during the evening and I was noticing the vast number of small sticks littering the road and wondering if the winds had done that much damage to the trees. Then I noticed that there were far more sticks littering the road adjacent to the crop fields. Yeah, you guessed it, they weren't sticks at all. They were WORMS. Enormous, gigantic, disgusting WORMS. I truly cannot impress upon you the size of these things. UUUUUGGGGGHHHHH!!!! I didn't even want to drive over them!! (One, on principle - I hate killing anything and two, because it was just DISGUSTING!!!)

I'm glad to report that today was frigid with hurricane force winds, but I have no further worm or monsoon incidents to report. And I got to see my nephew!!