Childhood and adulthood, broken into blocks on a timeline. This one may seem endless, that one but a breath. And yet they overlap and begin again, a glued-together strip of life.

This has been a quiet era. A pale paper block with tattered edges and a smooth surface. A quiet journey through time can heal the worst of torn places and restore needed perspective. Silence can renew focus and bring forth life.

Bring forth life… soul and body…

soul and body…

***

I’m pleased to introduce you to the newest Baker boy.

Shelton John

Born at home on April 24, 2012

10 pounds even

21.5 inches long

We have been drunk on baby bliss for these three weeks.

We are asked often if he is our first.

Yesterday a woman patted my shoulder. “You just don’t seem old enough to be a mother of three.”

I want to tell each of them that I’m not, really.

Except that, well, I suppose I am.

I’m begging my brain to find words for Shelton’s birth. It was all forms of beautiful and terrifying and has settled itself deep inside of me, a life altering moment of clarity.

I’ve been tapping my keyboard over the weekend, and perhaps soon I’ll have a version of those thoughts worth sharing here.

I’m not sure there is anything, anything at all, quite like the moment of beginning.

Soul and body…

***

an introduction ©Copyright 2011 Ashleigh Baker | Heart Words. All rights reserved.

Today we are all home. Coughs and runny noses abound. We drizzle elderberry into oats and drink it by the spoonful and manage to stay ahead of most traveling germs, but sometimes they catch us anyway and we resort to Rebecca’s herbal vapor rub. I dropped a meatloaf into our old black crockpot and we’re going tonight to gather an old table for my craft room. It is big enough for cutting sheets of fabric and making a perfectly royal mess.

Have you ever stepped off a merry-go-round because you felt sick and then watched it spin for a while? It is thrilling, the whirl, but sometimes your equilibrium must settle for a moment before you grab a bar and swing yourself back into the fun. I’m watching it spin for just a while, standing in my small and quiet space, here.

My boy brings me his children’s Bible, a tattered relic now, the one his grandma read to his daddy. And instead of sighing, due to the book and the need, I say yes. Then he asks to hear Blackbird on the record player and says he wants a sip of my coffee.

We watched home videos all weekend and I only cried twice.

***

Also, there’s this:

***

In this time of breathing life, I write more words at Deeper Story than I do here. I said some things about God, again, last week, on the question of God’s gender.

Will you be at BlissDom next month? I’ll be there, hanging with the lifestyle bloggers as a Community Leader and hugging people. Come find me if you’re there – I want to see you! I’ll be the one taking my ginormous baby bump out onto the dance floor.

 ***

Have you remembered to breathe today?

blackbird fly ©Copyright 2011 Ashleigh Baker | Heart Words. All rights reserved.

It was pizza night at Grandma’s house, a week before Christmas. Everyone was there – my uncle and two aunts, my mama and daddy. And of course there was the bevy of cousins scattered throughout each brightly lit room.

My brother was the youngest of the bunch at the time. Four years old with big eyes, ridiculously long eyelashes and warm brown hair in an early ’90s bowl cut.

The pizza guy was young and asked the routine Christmas question as he handed my dad the pizza boxes above Zach’s little head.

“What’s Santa going to bring you for Christmas?”

Tiny, skinny Zach looked up at him squarely.

“Nothing. Santa Claus is dead.”

The pizza man’s face froze and my dad couldn’t quite muffle his guffaw. This wasn’t exactly how my parents had planned it…

Discussing the Santa vs. Jesus debate over at Deeper Story today – click here to read the rest.

jolly ol’ saint nick and the manger baby ©Copyright 2011 Ashleigh Baker | Heart Words. All rights reserved.

It’s 2:30 in the afternoon and we’ve skipped lunch. We ate egg sandwiches on oversized bagels late in the morning and munched cheese sticks coupled with M&M sprinkled cookies just a bit after noon.

But my babies’ tummies are small and, of course, we didn’t eat a normal meal at the normal time.

“I’m staaaaaaaarving,” says the older one in the back seat. My own stomach, now sitting high above the baby growing beneath it, rumbles a bit and I glance at John.

“There’s a Panera across the street. Or, hey, isn’t there a Cracker Barrel off the next exit?”

“Staaaaaarving, Mama!” The littler one echoes everything his brother says.

And I think of them. Those mothers.

Their babies cry, too. They whine over empty tummies that rumble strong as their bodies are feeding off of themselves.

There’s no Panera across the street. There isn’t food within a few days’ walk.

But their little ones cry and the babies growing in their wombs are malnourished before they’ve taken a breath.

And my mama heart wonders how their mama hearts manage when there isn’t a normal noon meal to be skipped.

***

John, the boys and I sponsor several children through the amazing work being done by our friends at both Compassion International and World Vision. We also support women and children’s communities in Uganda and India, which provide food and care for mothers and their young babies.

But there are still entire groups of men, women and children who are starving – and dying – each day because food is nowhere to be found. For these, further help is needed.

I have never been truly starving. I haven’t ever needed food and been forced to wait more than a few hours due to convenience and immediate circumstance. But I’ve been told that when starving, one can feel their own body begin to eat itself, searching for protein in each muscle once all fat stores have been reduced. It is a slow and intensely painful reality, often resulting in extreme illness and premature death for its victims.

Nobody chooses a hunger riddled life. But nearly 1 billion people on our earth are currently living a life of starvation.

***

World Vision is fighting the global food crisis with donations given here. Thanks to grants and food donations, each gift, regardless of size, is multiplied five times to feed hungry people and aid in food production.

Samaritan’s Purse provides food and educates families on nutrition.

One.org and this article on CNN both host long lists of various organizations on the ground in the Horn of Africa, a region facing severe famine.

The Hunger Notes of WorldHunger.org gives current facts and numbers regarding the hunger crisis in our world today.

Can we, the ones who ate three meals yesterday and likely a snack or two, help these parents and their children caught in hunger’s vile grip?

***

This post is part of the Twelve Causes for Christmas series, begun by my dear friend Joy Bennett. Through simply sharing our thoughts and telling our stories, a group of friends and I are spreading the word about some of our most passionate causes and encouraging each other to heap love and compassion throughout this season. As Joy says, we can’t all do everything, but we can all do something.

Click around below to discover if any of these causes become dear to your heart, and if you’d like to write and add your own post to the group, please join us!

heart famine ©Copyright 2011 Ashleigh Baker | Heart Words. All rights reserved.

I’ve been sitting on a slipcovered sofa, staring. Tilting my head this way, that. Hoping to find its secret.

I forgot to pick up a child from school yesterday. And he isn’t even my own child.

It was 4:20pm and I wondered what I had missed and then I screamed and shouted for my keys and ran out the door and realized I didn’t have his mother’s number saved in my phone.

The school said he’d been picked up and then his mother called as I was weaving my way into her driveway.

She was laughing. She said it was no big deal and not to worry and it made her laugh.

She thought it was freaking hilarious.

I couldn’t breathe easily for three hours and my legs were adrenaline-numb for even longer.

“If my son having to wait for his school pickup for thirty minutes is the worst thing that happens to him, then I’ll sing hallelujah and life will be perfect.”

She says it as she holds scars from brain surgery and can’t drive because of seizures and her three year old daughter battles illnesses of which the severity is too much to speak.

My bathroom mirror is covered in toothpaste thanks to small boys who still need help polishing teeth. The trash bin has exploded and the towels need a hot water wash.

There is a pile of clothes two feet high covering my bedroom blanket chest and I haven’t opened my closet in a week because why should I when everything is right there? I think all the socks are clean. Who knows.

Today I panicked because it all needs to happen but my day planner shows a trail of tasks too long and there isn’t time to worry about toothpaste and clothes hangers.

I attempted to clean the truck after hauling car seats to the garage and filling the vehicle with women for a weekend. But I forgot about the dinosaur stickers.

When she chuckled and mentioned them, sitting back there, I launched a diatribe about not allowing stickers on anything but paper but they ended up stuck to everything anyway and oh mah gah I can’t stand all the stickers on tables and windows and beds and books and…

She was quiet right then.

Half an hour later the conversation had turned and she was taking us into her story. Babies gone too soon and rejection from the people she loved and her daughter so sick in the hospital and cancer, cancer, cancer.

She told us it has healed as it has ravaged and that she is thankful to not care about things like messes and hurry and dishes and…

stickers, I whispered.

I feel it all, tight in my chest, when every room looks like a bomb or it’s time for school and Troy hasn’t even put on his jeans or I miss a deadline or my list won’t be shortened or the whining from Merritt just. won’t. stop.

It’s there, frustration ready to shoot like a missile headed toward whomever happens to be the nearest target when all I want to do is punish myself.

Why is it so hard to just… be perfect?

Today I said yes instead of no on our way home from the chiropractor and we ordered sausage burritos for a dollar.

And I haven’t cleaned the bathroom.

I pulled a shirt from the laundry pile.

And I told myself to just stop trying so hard

because does it even matter?

perfect ©Copyright 2011 Ashleigh Baker | Heart Words. All rights reserved.