I think zadok is getting closer to being able to be weaned.  Tonight ALL he wanted to do was blow raspberries on my chest, or gently bite me (which is hilarious, I think he's trying to find a compromise between his love of biting to play and my constant admonitions to 'be gentle').. if he keeps this up I might actually let monroe parent him to sleep, which is so on the borderline (to me) of him 'crying it out' that right now it's a last resort.  Right now, I am 'not offering, not refusing' a la La Leche League, and that has cut his feedings down to nothing but naptime and nighttime and wakeup feedings. No more snacking throughout the day, though I still use it as a comfort measure when he gets hurt-- he falls a lot lately! His feet must be growing.
And for naptime and nighttime, I play misty edwards' Relentless cd, disc 2, and after nursing him, when he is almost asleep, I scoot him over in bed and say "night night", and he rolls over, sometimes whimpers a bit, and then drifts off to sleep.  I get so excited each time it happens, I know we are on our way to night weaning without crying it out; to me that is a huge accomplishment.  We just need to establish a firmer nighttime routine to really get him in the swing of things. I can't decide between a nightly walk or watching tv together.  Don't roll your eyes at me, I know, I HATE tv too.. but being pregnant has cut my energy down to the point that on the nights I just want to PASS OUT, I know I can still do our routine.  And it's a bit scary to go for walks at dusk here.. drug addicts tear down our sleepy little residential street going 60 after it gets dark.  And a couple of blocks away, two weeks ago, a woman got blockaded from passing and dragged out of her car and shot four times, over a misunderstanding, because she had borrowed the car of someone who was supposed to get killed.  And yesterday my mother in law, who we live with, sat in the front lawn at 6am and watched the neighbors' house next door get robbed. she was too scared to do anything, thinking of the old woman down the street who was just murdered, so she just sat very still until they left.  So.. I'm constantly being told to not go into the neighborhood after dusk.  Maybe I can figure something else out.. if I could muster up the energy each night for bathtime, that would be nice. We'll see.
We're doing vacation bible school this week, and I'm taking my two nieces that we are helping with, along with three more of my nieces that belong to my brother-in-law.  Add zadok and our minivan is totally packed.  It's a good feeling, a very mothering feeling, to take care of so many kids, drive them around, feed them breakfast, get them all set for church, bring them home excited and full of their variations of stories about the bible.  It reminds me of the word God gave me when I taught VBS in Reynosa, Mexico, (which is 5 minutes from here) when I was 15.  He spoke clearly to me and told me this is what I would do for the rest of my life.  Confusing to say the least, as I had never felt called to mexico and didn't intend to come back, at least, not for a long period of time.  Fast forward a little bit and here I am, living a few minutes from that very spot, raising my mexican kid and teaching little mexican kids about Jesus.  pretty fun.

Oh yeah and Hurricaine Dolly will be here in two days! So we have to drive north about an hour and go stay in a shelter there for people fleeing the hurricaine. It's just a category 1 so far so hopefully the house will be fine when we get back.. pray for us, it's gonna be interesting.

love,

h

I'm reading this study that a doctor compiled on vaccines, and it just makes me sick. I try my best to not inject my politics into the things, I would rather preach Christ crucified than get preachy on any other subject of less importance.  But this is one of those things that, some mom or mom-to-be skims across on the internet, it catches their eye, and the resulting research they read could very well save their childs' life or change their life dramatically and forever. so here are just a few of the quotes;

According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency's massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines -- thimerosal -- appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. "I was actually stunned by what I saw," Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants -- in one case, within hours of birth -- the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.

More than 500,000 kids currently suffer from autism, and pediatricians diagnose more than 40,000 new cases every year. The disease was unknown until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among eleven children born in the months after thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines in 1931.

"You couldn't even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe," says Haley, who heads the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky. "It's just too darn toxic. If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its brain will sicken. If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die. If you put it in a petri dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would be shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing damage."

In the decades that followed, the evidence against thimerosal continued to mount. During the Second World War, when the Department of Defense used the preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required Lilly to label it "poison." In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice when added to injected vaccines. Four years later, Lilly's own studies discerned that thimerosal was "toxic to tissue cells" in concentrations as low as one part per million -- 100 times weaker than the concentration in a typical vaccine. Even so, the company continued to promote thimerosal as "nontoxic" and also incorporated it into topical disinfectants. In 1977, ten babies at a Toronto hospital died when an antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical cords

click here to read the full study: http://www.drjaygordon.com/development/news/deadly.asp

I have been given a lot of crap from friends, family, nurses, childcare workers, etc. for not vaccinating Zadok.  We plan to vaccinate him with mercury-free vaccines when he is a little older and his immune system is mature enough to better withstand the rounds.  As for now, we aren't leaving the country, so we are most definitely erring on the side of caution and doing what any good doctor would tell us to do, which is assess the risk of vaccinating, and assess the risk of not vaccinating, and then choose the choice that poses the least risk.  It's pretty obvious to me from this and many, many other studies that I've read that NOT vaccinating poses the least risk to our child. 

Just a few weeks ago there was a march on washington with hundreds of thousands in attendance, for people affected by autism who are against mercury-laced vaccines. If you're out driving and you see one of those "ribbon" magnets with a bunch of little puzzle pieces all over it in different colors- that's someone affected by autism. Expect to see a lot more of them for as long as the mercury-laced vaccines are still on shelves across the country.  I heard in the news recently that they are now trying to get rid of those with mercury and use the newer, safer, mercury-free vaccines in more places.  But that the mercury-laced vaccines were bought by the government and given to health clinics across the country, keeping them stocked in the dangerous vaccines for generations to come.  Be careful of the care your kids receive.. you should not blindly trust your family doctor to make the best choices for your family.  Ultimately it's your total responsibility as their parent to make sure they receive the best care possible.  Medical mistakes are the 5th leading cause of death in America.. doctors aren't gods, and hospitals are more places of death than of life.  Pray for the life of your children and pray about the decisions you make about their health.  In science we are constantly realizing our mistakes too late and families become statistics in a medical journal.  But only God knows our bodies inside and out, and can direct us to care for our children with the wisdom that comes from above, not with earthly wisdom.  What the bible has to say about earthly wisdom is a direct reflection of what politicians and the pharmacutial industry and the FDA are like.  I hope that more christian parents can become people who walk with the wisdom of God and no longer bow to the culture and to american 'wisdom'.

Who among you is wise and understanding? Let him show by his good behavior his deeds in the gentleness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your heart, do not be arrogant and so lie against the truth. This wisdom is not that which comes down from above, but is earthly, natural, demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there is disorder and every evil thing. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, reasonable, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without hypocrisy. James 3:13-17

Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison.

O Death, where is your victory? O Death, where is your sting?
Death is swallowed up in victory.

prayed the armor of God over myself today. listening to shane & shane singing about loving Jesus. I feel productive today and like I've passed through something. my room feels like an oasis now, not at all because it is remotely clean, but because the holy spirit is present here. things are just.. good. things are the same here, but God is good.

So lots of crying today.  I feel really vulnerable lately, and that seems to be compounded with a lot of repressed something or others- floating nameless feelings that I'm avoiding dealing with- that I am going through because of my pregnancy hormones, dealing with living here,

(side note: some people seem to not know- we are living in Monroe's mom's house in Edinburg, Texas now- with 6 of his family members in a three bedroom house. That's why there are cockroaches and stuff.. we arrived here and it was virtually unliveable.  We've been fighting to clean and eradicate the rats and roaches and stuff for a month and a half.. it's about 80% cleaner but still filthier than anywhere I have ever lived.. that's where we're at.) 

....the uncertainty of everything, like, are we going to adopt the girls, or are we going to be just another blip in their lives- something that was nice for awhile, then suddenly gone, like the occasional pretty dress or new toy Monroes' mom scrounges up the money for, that is usually immidiately destroyed by the carelessness of everyone living here. That's my fear- that we will actually make things worse for them somehow, shake their lives up and then leave. Though Monroe disagrees, and says any positive change is good, even if we don't adopt them after all.
We wouldn't adopt them if their mom makes the changes she agreed to make.  To me, it's not enough that she meets the basic requirements that DHS would court-order.  They deserve to be really loved.  I'm just trying to move in the Lord's timing and remember that there are literally billions of kids out there waiting to be adopted, and we can only take in a few.  If Delkis and Cathia are two of them, I'll be estatic, because I'm already in love with them and feel a strong desire to take care of them and give them a home with us.  But if their mom does change, even if she doesn't take them to the best schools and feed them healthy food and read to them every night- even if she keeps bar hopping and living off welfare and using her 16 year old daughter to do most of their care taking- I have to trust that God is still moving and perhaps has some orphans for us to take in who would otherwise have contracted AIDS as child sex workers in India or something. I have to walk in His plan, I have no perspective whatsoever.
So I feel like I'm floating, with nothing to hold onto but His goodness. 
Which is always enough... I've just been letting things sit on me and squeeze out my peace today.

Now I have a happy story.  I had a boil on my leg, apparently they are extremely common here- I had to go to the hospital to get it dealt with because it was so infected it was all dark purple and hard.. and the two nurses in the room were showing me the places on their body where they either had them in the past, or still had them right then. It was pretty funny. (here they call them "tachotes" and it's usually just like a zit on your arm or leg. unless it gets infected, like mine.)
So the doctor very lovingly and gently shows me how to squeeze it until it burns like fire and I'm writhing around in pain making dying animal noises on the table, while the nurses stare at me with scared faces like "MY tachote never got that bad".  And tons and tons of black looking blood mixed with pus just poured out of it.  This stuff had been coming out of it twice a day but I hadn't messed with it that much.  So I got a prescription for some antibiotics I can take while pregnant and nursing, and went home and squeezed the crap out of it, until all the black blood came out, and then this hard green mucous actually got stuck and wouldn't come out, and then all of a sudden all this blood and mucous shot out and just kept coming out, and then a blood clot came out, and then more pus, and then it flattened out and gave up and a little bit of watery looking blood came out, and it was all done.  It was pretty exhilerating, I felt like I had won a battle.
But not it's all hard again and now refusing to expel anything at all, so I don't know what that means. Hopefully that it's healing? Hmm. I'm getting my prescription filled tomorrow, that should help it along.  I was really happy about just getting to go to a doctor for it though, I never used to go to the doctor for anything, so it feels really nice to immidiately address a problem and feel accomplished.  And not nauseated at all, as you may feel after reading this, sorry about that.
That's all the excitement around here, except for the fact that I am so stoked to start shopping for the new baby, I already started a store registry by shopping online and have been watching videos comparing different kinds of tandem strollers. TWO BABIES!!! Twice as much shopping! Twice as much fun!!