Certified Doula

i am officially certified! yea! I am finally on the DONA webpage under birth doula's.
It is so awesome to finally have a skilled trade.

third times the charm


I sent my doula certification off yesterday. It only took me two years!

Tea Party

Well, Nathan said no way to working at Starbucks, so i guess I'm going to be pursuing the doula route! Pray I'll get clients! I'm also praying about pursuing a job with the county as a doula-so i can continue working with a lot of the hard cases-drug addicts, mostly. A lot of these women have no family involved, their living in shelters
or rehabs, and need help before, during and after labor. There is now no positions for a doula with the county, but I'm praying about how or even if i should approach the county about creating a position for one.

For those of you who love us

It's pretty certain right now that I need to get a job. Our rent went up to 1300 and we lost our missionary support. Please pray for us for wisdom!!!!!! I just did my last birth needed to get certified as a doula. I need to know what path to take-to pursue my doula career now or humble myself and work at Starbucks. Coffee morals aside, starbucks would be a big sacrifice as far as the kids are concerned. If i can even get them to hire me. Please pray that God would guide us.

Life
otherwise titled whoa, i have alot of daughters!

NATURAL FAMILY PLANNING VS CONTRACEPTION

For you, Granmie, because you are getting jipped

Amber

this is my friend Amber. I met her two weeks ago and she asked me to be her doula.


She labored for 28 hours


this is her beautiful daughter, Raina Ani, born June 13th, 11:10 p.m

i thought this was funny

PROVERBS AND FIRST-GRADERS

A first grade school teacher in Virginia had twenty-five students in her class. She presented each child in her classroom the first half of a well-known proverb and asked them to come up with the remainder of the proverb.

It's hard to believe these were actually done by first graders. Their insight may surprise you. While reading, keep in mind that these are 1st graders, 6-year-olds, because the last one is a classic!

1. Don't change horses until they stop running.

2. Strike while the................................................bug is close.

3. It's always darkest before ...............................Daylight Saving Time.

4. Never underestimate the power of ....................termites.

5. You can lead a horse to water but ....................how?

6. Don't bite the hand that....................................looks dirty.

7. No news is......................................................impossible.

8. A miss is as good as a ...................................Mr.

9. You can't teach an old dog new ......................math.

10. If you lie down with dogs, you'll ...................stink in the morning.

11. Love all,trust.................................................me.

12. The pen is mightier than the............................pigs.

13. An idle mind is...............................................the best way to relax.

14. Where there's smoke there's...........................pollution.

15. Happy the bride who.....................................gets all the presents.

16. A penny saved is...........................................not much

17. Two's company, three's ................................the Musketeers

18. Don't put off till tomorrow what .....................you put on to go to bed.

19. Laugh and the whole world laughs with you, cry and....You have to blow your nose.

20. There are none so blind as.................................Stevie Wonder.

21. Children should be seen and not .......................spanked or grounded.

22. If at first you don't succeed ..............................get new batteries.

23. You get out of something only what you ............see in the picture on the box.

24. When the blind lead the blind ............................get out of the way.

And the WINNER and last one!

25. Better late than..............................pregnant

Sometimes the beauty of the world is so overwhelming, I just want to throw back my head and gargle. Just gargle and gargle, and I don't care who hears me, because I am beautiful.

jack handy

wow, the love of money really is the root of all evil

a Britain mother shares how her abortion affected her;

"Yes, I am filled with regret that my circumstances didn't allow me to have three children. If we'd had a bigger house and more money, I would not have had a termination and I'd be a very happy mother of three.

I realise my decision may affect me later in life, but I try not to dwell on my decision for the sake of my children. It was a difficult choice and it's certainly one I wish I hadn't had to make."

oh my gosh.

Breakups are HARD

but that's life, i guess. One breakup after another. My mind has been dwelling on this for a few weeks now. I was working out and listening to my music mix and madison greene came on. That band was so special to me, so incredibly precious, that when they broke up, my heart broke, too. I lived with them, traveled with them, rocked out to their music night after night for months. God really anointed their music with harmony and infectious joy. "all good things come to an end" So trite, but so true. I have come up with so many reasons why this is true. Situations in our life sometimes seem to mirror heaven, don't they? But we're not in heaven. We're not supposed to be totally comfortable here. We're not home yet. And I think that when those special times come along, it's just to awaken more and more that hunger for heaven that is in every one of us. Take prodigal project, for instance. When the ministry was busting at it's seams. Instead of me moaning because that all ended, i should be grateful i ever experienced it, and that it went on as long as it did. The only reason it was so awesome was because for a short while, we experienced a glimpse of heaven through it. Pure, breathtaking community.
why am i so geared to hang on to the past? I pray that my heartaches will live in my mind as beautiful memories, and lose their sting of loss. I am so desperate to glean every ounce of good out of every day now, because i know now how quickly this wave of life is carrying me.

Here you go, Granmie

Power of Prayer: Amelia White


Its hard not to ooh and awe when little three month old Amelia comes into the room. She is a picture perfect little girl. For mom and dad, she is a living breathing miracle.

Jennifer and Taylor White had been married for several years when they decided to add children to their family. A first pregnancy ended in a miscarriage. Then last March, Jennifer became pregnant again.

Just as the critical first six weeks approached a blood sample tested positive for spinal bifida. They headed straight to Dallas to a specialist who said that test was negative...but

"He told us, there was no amniotic fluid," says Taylor White. "And this was our first ultra sound of the pregnancy, this was our first time to even see...and there was no amniotic fluid, no kidneys of course because there was no amniotic fluid. We probably sat in the parking lot for maybe 30 minutes and just...dumb founded, and just awed and cried and just we didn't know what to do, we didn't know what to think."

"He told us then," says Jennifer White, "if I were you I would go home and pray, because it really doesn't look good."

The Whites had to another two weeks for final confirmation. 14 days later the news wasn't any better.

"I'm almost certain your baby has no chance of living," Taylor remembering what the specialist said. "In fact he used the word zilch, zilch chance. There is no amniotic fluid, there is not a genetic reason to explain this, it just happens. You can either terminate the pregnancy now or you can go through the pregnancy...and the baby will probably be still born or be born alive and die a couple of hours after being born."

"We decided," said Jennifer, "that we thought that was the best option, was to go ahead and induce early. I mean I would have a normal delivery you know and what understood the outcome would be the same, the baby was not going to make it either way. For me I could not imagine having to carry this baby to full term."

That early delivery would have happened at Tyler's Trinity Mother Frances Hospital. But because it was so early in the pregnancy, the hospital's ethics committee said no.

That's when Jennifer said she became angry... At God.

"And I thought you are going to make me carry this baby I can't, I can't do this I just can't. And the whole weekend I was just so mad that I was going to have to do this. By the end of the weekend I thought there is nothing I can do. I trust that God knows what He is doing though I don't understand. I don't think He does things to harm us even though we can't understand why they have to happen. And I just thought, okay, if I'm gonna make it through this I have just go to trust that You have a plan and that You are going to be there for us and carry us through this," says Jennifer.

"By that point," remembers Taylor, "our prayer was more, initially, or first reaction was to pray to God to help us make it through it. To comfort us. Shortly after that our mind changed and we said God we know you have the power to change this, and we're putting this in Your hands.

Regular sonograms for the next six months still showed no amniotic fluid. An inducement was scheduled six weeks before the due date. One last sonogram indicated something had changed. The Whites headed straight to their specialist in Dallas.

"His face just dropped," remembers Taylor, "just with amazement said I can't explain it. There is no other explanation than God just performed a miracle. There is a normal amount of amniotic fluid at this point he saw possibly one kidney. He said this is a perfectly healthy baby. There should be..she should have deformities, she should have not developed lungs and none of that was an issue at this point. When God performs a miracle he doesn't do it half way."

"we hadn't planned for a baby. We didn't have any furniture, anything. We didn't think we were going to have a baby. So just getting to...I mean we went that day and found a crib. It was amazing," says Jennifer.



Almost nine months after their ordeal began, little Amelia Faith White was born. A blessing for her parents. And a testimony they say to the power of prayer.



"We started this prayer and our local group started praying for us and they told people and they told people and they told people. To this day we still talk to people, churches we have never even heard of in Oklahoma or across the U.S. We get emails from people we have near heard...say hey listen we just heard the new about your baby I can't believe she is healthy," says Taylor

"we could feel that. Because, just that we had the strength to bear it and go on I just knew people were praying and God was with us," says Jennifer. "Whether He just wanted to show His power, show what He can do...I don't know. I truly believe that yes, that it was a miracle. The He chose to save her life."

"the people have seen a miracle," believes Taylor. "And in today's world people need to know that God exists. And this is just one proof that there is a God. That we are not in control of our lives. And people around here today are going to get to see that and its affecting people right now.

America’s Silent Killer: 48.5 Million Americans Lost

It may sound like a scenario from a super-secret nuclear contingency plan, but a silent killer has eliminated a population equal to that of America's 60 largest cities. Forty-eight and a half million Americans have vanished without a trace! According to Dennis Howard, who heads The Movement for a Better America, "that's not some imaginary nuclear contingency plan. It is in fact the cumulative impact of nearly 34 years of abortion on demand.”

According to a regular annual review by The Movement for a Better America, a non-profit, pro-life education organization headquartered here, "Forty-eight and a half million Americans have vanished without a trace."

"This is not some imaginary nuclear contingency plan. It is in fact the cumulative impact of nearly 34 years of abortion on demand,” says Dennis Howard, a former investigative reporter and market researcher who heads the organization and who has been tracking the nation's abortion statistic since 1992.

"What's amazing," Howard says, "is that the vast majority of Americans hardly seem to notice."

His organization doesn’t make these numbers up. They are all based on data collected by the Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood. “We simply take the most recent data and project it through the current period. Otherwise, there is always a 2-3 year lag in the estimates.”

Howard asserts, "The fact is that nothing has inflicted more permanent damage on our society than abortion. 48.5 million abortions is 43 times more than all the fatalities from all the wars in our nation’s history, including the ravages of the war on terrorism and the tragedy of September 11. Yet these numbers never seem to make the headlines.”

Howard, who began his career as an investigative reporter and later directed market research projects for major corporations, blames the media for their self-imposed censorship on the abortion issue. “A handful of casualties in Iraq will make the evening news, but the abortion industry will kill more people in two days than we have lost since 9/11, and that never gets a mention.”

”Imagine if we had lost 6,850,000 people in the so-called war on terror,” he said. “That’s how many children we have lost to abortion since 9/11."

Howard's analysis has uncovered a number of reasons for public apathy about the abortion toll:

“Politics can’t change things because of the extreme polarization between the two major parties,” he said. “That started when the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade by edict, instead of allowing normal democratic processes to deal with the issue.

“Roe v. Wade effectively split the country in three – left, right, and confused middle. So now we have politics by media sound bite and bumper sticker cliches instead of healthy, honest political dialogue.”

“In some ways, we’re like the ‘good Germans’ during World War II who never seemed to realize that there was a brutal holocaust going on,” Howard said.

Howard blames public apathy on the fact that the abortion industry operates behind a veil of protected secrecy. “Unlike the Germans, we don’t have industrial-scale concentration camps operating two miles out of town. Only 1 in 15,000 American women have an abortion on any given day, so no one notices. But if you multiply that by 365 days a year for 34 years, the total becomes astronomical.”

Howard has been tracking the economic impact of the abortion toll since 1992, when the count first reached 30.5 million. Since then, an estimated 18 million more babies have been aborted.

“The economic loss may be the least of our problems,” he said. “Abortion has also desensitized the culture to sex abuse, violence, and predation against children. Just look at what we see on television every night."

Nevertheless, Howard’s market research background led him to conclude that the trend had the economic impact of a major nuclear war.

“The human loss from abortion is the same as if all of our major metropolitan centers had been lost to a nuclear attack,” said Howard. “The only difference is that a nuclear war would be a dramatic, cataclysmic event, while abortions take place one at a time in the sanitized privacy of a medical clinic.”

“The long range impact on America's human resources is no different,” he said. “We measure the economic impact of other things like this all the time -- from alcoholism and drug addiction to AIDS and cancer. But the economic impact of losing a baby is far greater than when someone dies after a long life.”

A list of the top 60 cities with a population equivalent to the loss from abortion can be found on MBA's website: www.movementforabetteramerica.org

A few of the more obvious repercussions include:

Social Security: If half of the 48.5 million kids we aborted were working today, they would be contributing an additional $88 billion a year into the Social Security trust fund.

Taxes: The downstream loss in future tax revenues from abortion currently exceeds $18 trillion dollars. “Someone else will have to pay those taxes.”

The end of the Youth Market. “The 30% bite that abortion took out of the youth market is a major reason for the drop in daily newspaper circulation as well as increased competition for young audiences by other media. By supporting abortion on demand, the liberal media are killing off their own future audiences. Pro-choice politicians are doing the same thing. That’s why they have such a hard time winning.”

Labor shortages: There is a looming shortage of labor in critical fields such as nursing, teaching and even the armed forces. “We’re raiding countries like the Philippines for nurses today, and using citizenship as an incentive for immigrants to fill the ranks of the military. Where will that leave us in a major military crisis?”

Immigration: “The labor vacuum created by abortion is also related to the immigration crisis,” Howard claims. “Ross Perot had it wrong: The giant sucking sound was really the sound of illegal immigrants crossing the border from the south, not just jobs heading the other way. Right now, apples and peaches are rotting on the ground in Oregon and Washington because there aren’t enough workers to pick them.”

“As the Pete Seeger song says,” Howard concludes, “‘When will they ever learn?’”

I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every culture, is the story of Popeye.

deep thoughts by Jack Handy

Granmie Fix