Noah's Rainbow

April 1, 2021 To my Rainbow Baby, Henry, Today, you are seven weeks old! You are growing like crazy, baby boy!!! We had our follow up with the pediatrician and lactation consultant yesterday, and you gained one and a half pounds since we started supplementing your feeds!! I am overjoyed that you are thriving and healthy, and I am happy that what we have been doing is working for all of us. When we worked with the lactation consultant, it seemed that you were transferring more during feeds than you had been when we started, so you are doing better eating and momma’s supply looks like it is increasing. Praise God that everything is getting on track!! I pray that we continue in this positive direction with all of these things. This week, we said goodbye to Gram and Pops Miller after their extended stay to get to meet you. It has been so nice for them to be such a big part of the beginning of your life, and to have the extra help at home as we adjust to life as parents. We will see them ag...

March 11, 2021 To my Rainbow Baby, Henry, Today, you are four weeks- which is officially 1 month- old!! How is that possible?! Where have the last 28 days gone?! You are growing so fast, getting bigger and more personality everyday, and I just want time to stand still! I am already a third of the way done with my maternity leave, and even though summer will begin and give us another 10 weeks together two weeks after I go back to work, I am already feeling like this special time we’re having together just the two of us is flying by. I’m doing my best to drink up every moment I have while you are this little, because I know it will be gone before I know it. I’ve been thinking a lot about the passage of time this week because everyone is talking about the fact that we’ve officially been in this pandemic for a year. A year of shut downs, a year of socially distancing, a year of mask wearing, a year of anything but normal. For us in particular, it has also been a year since we reached a maj...

Listen to this post here    It seems fitting that I am writing this piece just before Christmas. In my previous piece on guilt and mercy, I promised to discuss their siblings, shame and grace. While shame is closely linked to guilt, it is a battle all its own. It’s been a while, so let’s refresh our memories on that vocab lesson from last time: Guilt is thinking, “I did something bad.” Shame is thinking, “I am a bad person.” The losses we suffer on our journey to motherhood can heap immense guilt upon us, some of it earned but some of it not. Regardless of how the guilt gets there, the remedy is always mercy: “compassion or forgiveness shown towards someone whom it is within one’s power to punish or harm.” This mercy comes from God, who doesn’t punish any of these sins as they deserve, but shows us His loving kindness in our afflictions from guilt. But guilt can be a tricky business which will lead us right into the lap of what we’re going to look at today. If we don...

  Listen to the post here Let’s start with a vocabulary lesson today. The English teacher in me wants to make sure we all have a clear understanding of some words that are vital to today’s thoughts :) Personally, I struggle a great deal with Biblical words that seem to mean the same things and are often used interchangeably in Scripture. Two such words are “shame” and “guilt.” I have always treated these words as synonyms, and in a lot of ways they are. But this past January (feels like a century ago, doesn’t it!), I was in some professional development at school, and the speaker- who was presenting on trauma-based teaching- said something incredibly profound about the difference between these two words: Guilt is thinking, “I did something bad.” Shame is thinking, “I am a bad person.” In this light, they become incredibly unique from one another. Based on these lines of thinking, guilt is something that we can move past, if we rectify the bad thing we have done. However, ...