Some more pictures of precious Olivia...

 

And some pics I took at the park with the girls...

Fun, fun, fun!

Meet Olivia Grace!

Yesterday was a VERY exciting day!  My third niece was born, healthy and happy, with two adoring sisters ready to spoil her.  Her name is Olivia Grace, and she is just perfect.  Here are some pictures from that blessed event...

Clay sharing the amazing news!

Meeting Olivia.

Such a great Momma (of three!).

Showering new sister with kisses. 

A very thrilled Papa and Nonnie meeting Olivia.

An equally thrilled Mia and Gramps meeting her.

 Gianna was SO excited!

 Looking at Olivia through the nursery window.

 Olivia looking right back at her sisters.

 Natalie stroking Olivia's hair.

 This whole being born business is exhausting!

Happy girls (Clay's way outnumbered now, but I know he can handle it!).

It's official.  I'm smitten.  She's adorable.

 All swaddled and cozy.

 Holding hands with big sister Natalie.

Babies have such wisdom in their eyes. 

Welcome to the world, Olivia Grace!  It's a more joyful place with you here.

Music Where It Least (and Most) Belongs

There was a single black roach creeping along the whitewashed concrete walls of my dorm room like a brooding villain. I thought that would be the worst thing that happened that day. I thought wrong. Gulping down coffee, I rushed off to my first class, World Music. A little beacon of beauty and strangeness in the midst of a mundane schedule of chem labs. As I entered the room, the air was somehow different than before. Was it colder? Not temperature-wise, but there was something chilling to the silence. It was somehow frozen – stiller, without the usual murmurings of sleepy students and rustlings of bags and papers. I took my seat, in the front (because that's often where the left-handed desks were to be found), and joined the uneasy stillness. My professor looked at us with a look that could break your heart in one glance, full of oceans of sorrow and waterfalls of confusion, the eyes of a grieving mother.

Slowly, deliberately, with the same measured monotone of words like “She's gone” and “There was an accident...”, she told us that planes had been hijacked and flown into buildings. Two planes, two buildings. The twin towers, in New York City. I struggled to take in this information, like I had just been told the earth was flat or gravity decided to take a break. I couldn't comprehend it. She said that, for the moment, we would have to stay in our classroom, until it was confirmed safe enough to leave. Now the silence took on a forced quality, like we had all forgotten what it was to speak. Wondered if we'd ever spoken before. She said that she didn't know any more details or why it happened. I can't imagine what it would've been like to be in that professor's shoes that day. She had the grueling job of conveying unimaginably terrible news, and then she had to sit with us, and with the living thing that was the uneasy silence, and wait. For what? Wait for the news that it was a hoax? Wait for the news that other places across the nation – even our own – were under attack too? Perhaps that waiting is not unlike waiting for the call from the doctor, or waiting for the loved one who should've been home hours ago to turn the key in the door and shuffle down the hallway. We were forced to wait, together. The days of smalltalk and surface-level conversation left us unprepared for the intimacy of that waiting moment. But my professor, that woman with the grieving eyes, did the only thing that could be done in that moment: she put on music.

She filled the tumultuous silence that was laden with our unspoken questions with the most beautiful music ever composed, with Bach, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky. Suddenly the tears that had been waiting behind all of our eyes were freed. We wept together, silently, and let the music wash over us. It did not answer our questions of why and how and who, but instead called us to lay them aside for a moment and breathe, listen, become one with the music and with one another. Because in the waiting for greater agony or relief, that's all that can be done: breathe, listen for echoes of faint or overwhelming music, become one with each other, with God, with ourselves. 

The music took us from the habitual, impersonal surface-level relationship to the deepest of intimacy in a second. I imagine the grief did that, too. But the music opened us up to our grief and the professor, well, she opened us up to the music. So in that moment, before the television would replay the horrific scene of 9/11 over and over like it was some great football touchdown or viral Youtube video, before the impulse of revenge was indulged and we were all too raw to see another way, before our national grief gave way to the mental-internment of Muslims and those from the Middle East, before we would be shaken to our very core and built up by the stories of bravery and courage of ordinary people, there was the music.

Much worse things happened that September day than a roach crawling on the wall. But I give thanks to God for that professor who, with a heart full of music did only what came naturally, and let it overflow onto all of us. Not even remembering her name, I won't forget her kindness. Her courage. Her watery eyes. Her ability to take the most terrifying events and respond with what she loved most: music.  May God give me the same conviction to respond to the deepest of hatred with the deepest of love.

style, strangers & slumber

Look fetching, don't I?

That sun is bright!

-Hayden coming back from the groomers looking fluffy and adorable.  I'm not sure he enjoys the experience, but I enjoy the result for sure.

-Making friends with strangers.  Texans are such friendly folks (though I suppose most people are).  I made my new friends at the charming wine bar here in town. It's such a cozy place, and feels like several antique living rooms merged into one, with mismatched upholstered chairs adorning old carpets and wooden floors. Perfect for a glass of vino and a book, meeting an old friend or making new ones.

-Sleeping in...til 8:30!  With the colder mornings, my room was nice and cool and I nestled under a favorite blanket, grateful for the extra shut eye.

Gracie abounds

-Getting to have lunch with one of my best friends, Karen, her Mom and Gracie, Karen's little girl.  I see so much of Karen and Rob in Gracie, and can't help but smile being around her.  She's so joyful and curious about everything.  And, at 10 months, that girl can move!  Karen lives in Ohio and was home in Texas visiting family.  I was so glad we had time to see each other.  I left feeling known, filled-up (and not just from the Mexican food) and grateful for friends who I know will always be in my life.

-Skyping with the fantastic Blakes in Belfast.  They are just wonderful folks and it was so great to see them, share stories and catch up on life since we've last talked.  I miss them loads, but in that hour-and-a-half or so, it felt like the ocean separating us (literally) was a puddle.

-Walking outside and being greeted by a surprise autumn chill.  By noon it was warm again, but for the morning with the doors flung open and fresh fall air wafting through the house, it was bliss.

-The comfort of routine: every morning's quite similar in terms of taking my dog out, drinking coffee, checking emails etc...but now a bit of Buechner reading is part of the mix and I wonder why it hasn't been all along.

changed by the scenery

 -Beautiful Texas scenery on a road trip...

...admired while my precious dog slept on my lap.


-A relaxing evening spent reading some Frederick Buechner.  He's definitely one of my favorite theologians (as I'm sure you can tell by the quote on this blog).  Here are a couple of my favorite snippets (from his compilation, Secrets in the Dark):

We all want to be certain, we all want proof, but the kind of proof we tend to want—scientifically or philosophically demonstrable proof that would silence all doubts once and for all—would not in the long run, I think, answer the fearful depths of our need at all. For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages in the stars but who one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world. It is not objective proof of God's existence that we want but, whether we use religious language for it or not, the experience of God's presence. That is the miracle we are really after. And that is also, I think, the miracle we really get.

All the absurd little meetings, decisions, inner skirmishes that go to make up our days.  It all adds up to very little, and yet it all adds up to very much.  Our days are full of nonsense, and yet not, because it is precisely into the nonsense of our days that God speaks to us words of great significance--not words that are written in the stars but words that are written into the raw stuff and nonsense of our days, which are not nonsense just because God speaks into the midst of them.  And the words that God says, to each of us differently, are, "Be brave. . . be merciful. . . feed my lambs. . . press on toward the goal."

-A free Coke with a gas fill-up.  As Buechner would say, it's the little things that add up to much.