The Gender of Our New Baby

While we loved very much invading his space to take a peek at him, he was not thrilled at all.  It was so cute!! When the nurse first put the thing on my stomach he was stretched out with his legs crossed at the ankles and his hands over his ears. It was absolutely adorable!! He looked just like his daddy when Joel relaxes or naps on the couch! But as soon as he realized someone was poking around in his bubble he quickly balled up! He eventually ended up on his tummy with his knees tucked under him and his hands on his ears. It was really, really cute! I have posted a few pictures below w/ descriptions of what he is doing!

Me and Mom in the back seat on the way to the ultrasound!

Happy parents celebrating our baby boy

Lincoln sucking his thumb while holding up his little finger

His sweet little foot

Sucking his sweet thumb and holding up his finger  

Lincoln relaxing with his hands over his ears. Sooo cute!!

There is no hiding it!! He's a boy!!

Baby Update

Well, once again it has been awhile since my last post, but the good news is that I always have lots to post about.

For starters, the baby is doing great! I have now crossed into the beloved, coveted, highly sought after 2^nd trimester of pregnancy and boy did I fear this day would NEVER come.  To say that the past 3 months have seemed like an eternity is an understatement! The first trimester was extremely difficult for me. To call feeling nauseous all day every day, morning sickness, is a brutal tease of a pregnant woman’s emotions. It was one of the hardest physical trials I have ever gone through.  Forget ESOAL ladies… pregnancy will give you all the stretching you need! 

I must admit the hardest part of pregnancy for me has been the adjustment. It almost seems like this little precious, beautiful, amazing gift came into my tummy and rocked my whole world! I went from a strong, healthy, busy, happy, sweet woman… to a mean couch potato!!  Ok, maybe couch potato is a bit extreme (although there were those days) but it sure felt like that.  None of my clothes fit by the 2^nd month, I wake up at every possible noise, it takes about 30 minutes just to get comfortable for sleep (and I don’t even have a belly yet), and I was sick every day all day long.  I started throwing up at about two months so my doctor put me on some medication. Although the throw up stopped for the most part, I still felt nausea constantly knocking at my door.  My nausea was combined with extreme exhaustion. It seemed like doing the dishes was about all I could accomplish in a day’s time.  Going from a person who has a task list a mile long, and that’s just for one day, to only getting the dishes done… was very hard for me.  To help all you guys out there get a better picture of what morning sickness feels like… I will give you a quick example.  Joel and I had dinner at the Cheesecake Factory one night after the ATF.  After sharing the same dish (of which was the only thing we ate the same of all day) we both woke up at 3am throwing up with food poisoning.  We were each throwing up about twice an hour for approximately 10 hours straight. Joel was totally wiped out (I think he did get it a little worse than I did); at one point I thought he was going to die (and he is one tough cookie!) I on the other hand felt exactly the same as I have for the past 2 ½ months, only with food poisoning I threw up more.  I told Joel, “I guess I am just use to feeling this way!” To put a nice cherry on the top I have been traveling almost every weekend with ATF (which has been great).  In the past two weeks I have been home for 1 day, so needless to say I think I need a nice day at the spa to wrap up this first trimester!

So, I am currently on my 16^th week of pregnancy and some days I do feel better!  Every day I am getting more and more excited about having this baby.  It is amazing to me that I can love someone so much, yet I have never seen (besides the first sonogram where he/she looks like a small turtle) or felt them. I usually read everyday what is developing in our baby that week, and I get this overflow of love and joy in my heart for this little guy or girl. 

I have posted a picture of our very first sonogram at 2 months (they are just a little guy or girl) and my next sonogram will be around December 29^th) where we will find out if it is a boy or girl.  Please keep us in your prayers as the baby grows and develops!

Election Thoughts...

Well, the results are in and America has elected a new President.  I must admit when Ohio was called for Obama, my heart sank and I knew, as did everyone else, it was over for McCain.  I think I had been in denial, hoping that the poles were dead wrong and McCain would pull something out in the end.  I was praying for a miracle.

I must say that I am deeply proud of our country at history being made for electing the first African-American President.  I am so glad to know that we can put the color of a person’s skin aside.  This is indeed a tremendous feat for our nation. There are many people who paved the way for President Elect Obama, Dr. King, Rosa Parks, and so many others who stood up for equality. I could not imagine going through a time when I could not drink out of the same water fountain, eat in the same restaurant, use the same restroom, or attend the same school as another individual, simply because of the color of their skin.  I am so proud of how far our nation has come.  I wish I could say that we put the color of skin aside and voted on issues that we support and believe in, but I fear we voted on charisma, charm, and a desperate need for something different than President Bush.  I also am sure there are those who voted for him, just because of his skin color, and really did not care what he stood for.

So today we face a huge mystery as what our nation will look like in the next 4 to 8 years.  President Elect Obama holds one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate; perhaps he falls behind Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reed.  However Obama, knowing our country is a center country, ran a centralist campaign, claiming to lower our taxes and cut government spending just to name a few.  The only problem is… his voting record shows something quite different.   So what can we expect… we don’t really know, because we don’t really know Obama.  He stands a mystery; do we go by what he campaigned on, giving us hope that he may not entirely change our nation, or do we go on his voting record and past radical left wing associations, proving he will forever change the face of this nation. With a Democratic House and Senate, he will be unstoppable. I pray it is not the latter of the two, and hope that he will govern our nation from a centralist stand point.   In the next 8 years there are close to 2 Supreme Court Justices that will probably be replaced, perhaps the greatest fear of all.  So, what will our nation look like in these coming years… we must wait and see.

Now to the conservative party, McCain faced an extreme uphill battle; an unpopular war, unpopular President, unpopular party, and a bad economy.  The Republican Party has been a Party of big government, out of control spending, and getting further and further away from the family values we love and hold true, leaving us with the results we have today, A Democratic house, senate, and Democratic President. If we ever expect to have a place in the future elections, we must come back to the core of our beliefs.  We must come back to family values, no more scandals, financial fraud, and under the table deals, abusing the power the American people gave you.  We must come back to a party who values life, giving every unborn child their God given right to live! I want to encourage every Republican out there to take this opportunity to write your Republican Representative (if you have one) and encourage them to return back to the values we hold so dear.  Encourage them to hold their Republican colleagues accountable to and for their actions.   We must return back to the Reagan Conservatism that we love and believe in.

Please continue to pray for our nation.  We need it more now, than ever before.  

There is some juicy stuff in this one!!!!!

Well, once again it has been an eternity since my last post.  I try so hard to post regularly, but no matter what seems to happen, I always fall short. Well, brace yourselves because this is going to be a meaty one!

There have been many new developments in the Johnson household that I am just so excited to spill the beans on! First off, I just graduated from school! I did not think the day would ever come, but eventually it did!  I completed an associate program for Interior Design and I still have another year before I will have my bachelors, but I am not going to be pursuing that right away.  I think I need a break away from the textbooks for awhile.  I have posted a few pictures of my latest project. I really do not think the pictures do the drawings justice, but it will give you an idea of what type of work I have been doing. We designed an ourdoor space for a Garden Design Magazine Competition, with an outdoor kitchen as the primary focus.  We were required to do three perspectives and a site plan all rendered.

Getting Vulnerable

   Well, once again it has been awhile since my last post.  I really do try to post more often, but I just get lost in the day to day and can’t seem to find the time to update.  I have this funny feeling the world of xanga is close to obsolete, but I think there are still a few sole survivors, and for those, here is my update.

Here is my heart:

Life has changed in a substantial way for me and Joel.  No, we are not pregnant or making another move across the country, but we are very different people.  I don’t know how to describe the depths of my heart over a xanga post, but will do my best to try.  About 9 months ago the Lord took us through a situation, our houses not selling, that really rocked us to the core of who we are. It was not only the houses not selling, but all of the events that surrounded it.  We had just made a move away from the people nearest and dearest to us and took 6 months, day in and day out investing in this house to sell it.   Anyway, through this situation, we took a good long look in the mirror and realized we did not like the direction we were headed and needed a change.  It was nothing anyone could see from the outside, but on the inside our priorities had somehow gotten off track.  Since when did I care so much about the things around me? I think when you get married there is this new priority of a house, you need pretty things to fill your house, cars, 2.5 kids, and of course a puppy. That was never what I wanted to focus on, yet somehow it was most of what I ended up focusing on. Let me elaborate…

A few years ago I traveled to Calcutta, India where I worked in the Mother Teresa Homes and it forever changed my life.  I felt like over the past 9 months God took me back to that place, at the end of a woman’s bed who was dying from various diseases.  I sat there rubbing her feet, which were covered in black sores, as much as I could with my bare hands thinking to myself, ‘I may be the only Jesus she will ever see.’   I felt like God took me back to that place and said “Casey, where did that girl go? I want her back”.  Ouch! That one hurt, but it was the absolute truth.   If God took everything from me, would I be ok with that?  I am sad to say that the answer 9 months ago was no, but the answer today is yes.  I feel as if God did surgery on the both of our hearts and it has been a painful recovery process, but I think we have recovered.  Joel and I have made a lot of changes in our lives, and in the process rooted out a part of us that cared for the un-important things in life.  The things we cannot take with us.  We have let go of feeling as if we needed to control everything.  From the money we make, to the events that we are given, to the house we live in, and to what God chooses to remove from our lives.  We do not need to fight for us, that’s God’s job! If he is big enough to create the universe he is big enough to take care of me.  Simple truth, yet it is something I remind myself of almost daily! Now, I have not mastered this fight, it is a process and something I face daily, but God is changing us… and for that I am grateful!