God's little blessings...

I feel like it's been forever since I've written a blog post, I have so much to say I almost do not know where to start to fit it all in in a smooth way; so if this post is a bit scattered (lol) that would be why.

April 25th, Nathan and I went to the perinatal center to find out if we were going to have another sweet little girl, or our first son.  I had so much anxiety about it!  On one hand I have been longing for a boy for the last seven years and my desire for that little guy has not subsided one bit, however; on the other I am so unbelievably scared to have a boy!  I've never had a brother so...having a little boy around would be foreign to me, and a bit scary!  I have thought every baby I have had so far was going to be a boy, so I'm not great at guessing, but I was convinced that this one had to be!  All my pregnancies were different in their own way, but this one had one thing that I knew I never experienced before, an aversion to meat!  Mostly beef!  The smell of it, thought of it made my stomach churn!  I also took the gender prediction test that you pay $44.00 for at the drug store and it said BOY, so I was COMPLETELY convinced that this time we were having a boy!  Imagine my surprise when we found out that we were in fact having another baby GIRL!

Of course I did cry for a minute when I found out, I tried my best to hold it together until we left the appointment but when my midwife came in and started asking me questions I just lost it completely!  So many things were going through my head!  Since before Nathan and I were married I felt that God gave me a name for a boy; I have had periodic dreams of that little boy over the last 7 years and have held him and talked to him from the time he was a newborn till he was five years old!  I felt like God has been trying to tell me all these years that we are supposed to have a boy!  I also had told Nathan I thought this was going to be our last child.  I am over 30 now and I'm tired, I do not like pregnancy one bit and each time I do it it has gotten harder than the last.  Does this mean I didn't really hear God?  Does this mean we are supposed to have more children?  Maybe I just clung onto something that wasn't really from God and said it was??  What was going on??!!  My crying and disappointment wasn't because I didn't want another beautiful girl but it was because I thought I knew what God had in store for me and I was wrong!  I spent the remainder of the next few hours doubting my ability to hear the Lord, and doubting my understanding of what he wanted for me in my life.  Then after all the questioning and sobbing, Nathan says to me, "If you never had those dreams we would not have 6 beautiful daughters!  If you never had those dreams, we would have stopped after 2 children!  If we had the boy after the first or second child we would not have anymore than that.  If God didn't give us this desire for another child that we do not have yet, then baby #6 would be our last, but we can have another!"  His words were so true!

I was then reminded of something I had read in one of Beth Moore's books.  She said that she wanted a boy so badly but ended up with a few girls.  She realized that God had given her an amazing task of raising Godly women!  Made me feel a bit intimidated but I think I'm up for the task!

So once I got myself together and was able to take some time to change my mindset that it was now a girl instead of a boy, it was time to find a name!  Again, another thing that makes me anxious!  I feel like we've already exhausted all the names that we've liked so finding another girl name that held up to our standards was going to be a task!  We didn't want something that started with a letter we already had so A, S, E, T, J, were out.  It had to have a good meaning and also be fairly rare, nothing you hear ALL the time.  So after much searching and rummaging through my over used baby name book, we found a name.

     "Vaerity Cossette"  which means "Truthful and Victorious!"

So needless to say I am extremely excited to meet our little girl!  I'm at 24 weeks right now and the days cannot go by fast enough!

So becoming a family of 8 means we have to increase the size of our van.  We no longer will be able to take the entire family together somewhere.  We currently have a 7 passenger van and will now need to upgrade to a 12 passenger!  The downfall we JUST paid off our van so not having a van payment has been wonderful!!  We've also been on the search for another house.  We currently are in the same home that we purchased when we first got married and have been out of room for some time now.  We started looking for homes back in October of 2012 and did not have the best of luck.  We found a white house we loved, put in an offer and it was accepted.  Thirty minutes later they accepted another offer from someone else!  So we went on with the search!  We found a great house that we loved even more than the last one and put in an offer.  The house was a short-sale and so it was possible it would take a while!  So we waited, and waited, and waited....we received a few updates on the house but never good news, then after a 5 month wait we were told that it probably wasn't going to happen, the bank wasn't being cooperative and we need to move on.  So we looked at another home.  It was a forclosure but a great price, we put in an offer and it wasn't accepted.  At that point I was becoming further along in my pregnancy, so we decided that we were going to wait till next year to "look" for a home, however if something came our way that was EXACTLY what we wanted and nothing less we would go look.  Nothing did.

This week we got word that after waiting 7.5 month on the short-sale the bank has finally promised that they will approve and close on the house within 45 day!

This was nothing less than a miracle!  I was excited but kinda numb about it.  Nathan and I went back and forth about if it's the right decision to go ahead with it, while we thought it was perfect for our family we did become content with not moving this year!  I don't want a larger home JUST because it would be more comfortable, or just because we want it, I want it to be God's plan for us!  So after lots of praying we decided to go ahead and resubmit our offer, and if it is God's will things will go smoothly and work out well...if it is not it will fall apart and either one will be fine with us.  So we will be praying and would love others to pray for us through this as well!

In the meantime, we found out the news about the house while we were on vacation.  We had planned to go on vacation with Nathan's family this year but because of our time constraint with the pregnancy and not being able to travel after the second week in July we had to go ahead and go ourselves before then.  The only thing available was Massanutten, which turned out to be a lot of fun with the girls!  We visited the water park, got to ride ponies, went fishing and just had fun together as a family.  I'm so thankful that we are able to give our children fun family memories like this!  I hope they will cherish them forever!!