{"id":1531,"date":"2011-05-09T16:14:32","date_gmt":"2011-05-09T16:14:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/family\/?p=1531"},"modified":"2011-05-10T02:59:09","modified_gmt":"2011-05-10T02:59:09","slug":"mothers-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/family\/2011\/05\/mothers-day\/","title":{"rendered":"Mother’s Day"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Mother’s Day truly is the most important holiday (except Easter) for me.\u00a0 I would rather celebrate Mother’s Day than my birthday, and I don’t think that will ever change for the rest of my life.<\/p>\n

My entire life all I wanted was to be a mom and raise a family.\u00a0 That sounds so archaic, but it is also 100% truth.\u00a0 Like most girls I had a timeline in my mind from the time I was a high-schooler.\u00a0 I would go to A&M, meet my future husband in our sophomore year (freshman year was for partying).\u00a0 We would get engaged at the end of our junior year and get married after we graduated.\u00a0 We would both have\u00a0 steady jobs right out of college (and I didn’t want to live in San Antonio).\u00a0 3 years later we would have the first of 5 children.\u00a0 Yes, I wanted 5 children.<\/p>\n

Obviously that isn’t how my life turned out.\u00a0 I met a boy and we were on the right path to be engaged in college and married right after.\u00a0 Too bad God kept telling me\u00a0he wasn’t the right guy.\u00a0 Problem…there was nothing wrong with him!\u00a0 I walked away from a perfectly good man, and a perfectly good relationship.\u00a0 Then I proceeded to work in a job I hated, in a city that didn’t fit me.\u00a0 After several stupid career moves and 2 changes to my city…I landed back home.\u00a0 In good old San Antonio.\u00a0 Low and behold…there was this other boy there.\u00a0 He had always been there as my friend, but this time it was different.\u00a0 This time everything was perfect.\u00a0 Everything was easy.\u00a0 This time he<\/em> was the RIGHT boy.\u00a0 Luckily he thought I was the right girl, too!<\/a> \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Back to the Mother’s Day part…we got married after dating for a measly 10 months, because when you know, you know.\u00a0 Why waste time?\u00a0 We got married in December 2005 and started trying to get pregnant in January 2007.\u00a0 18 LONG months passed with no success.\u00a0 Those 18 months were very long, and very dark for me.\u00a0 My faith was rocked more in those 18 months than in the 3 years I spent without a single date.\u00a0 Somehow I knew I would find the right husband, but I didn’t know if I would ever get my one true desire…a house full of children.\u00a0 We talked about fertility treatments and I had a referral from my OB.\u00a0 In the end I just couldn’t make myself do it.<\/p>\n

We all know that God has his perfect timing, and I just felt like if I went in for fertility treatments I wasn’t relying on God’s perfect timing.\u00a0 I don’t have any judgment for people who do fertility treatments…it just wasn’t what God wanted from us.\u00a0 My good friend Jill gave me the perfect encouragement in that horrible and scary time.\u00a0 She said that God is capable of anything, and that if he wants me to do fertility treatments he will change my heart.\u00a0 She was 100% right, and her conviction gave me such incredible peace in a very scary time.<\/p>\n

We all know the rest of the story…Reed was born in March of 2009.\u00a0 Light of my life, joy of all joys.\u00a0 Even how he was born was orchestrated by God.\u00a0 God wanted Reed to live, and God wanted me to have Reed.\u00a0 His timing is perfect.<\/p>\n

Since we had so much trouble getting pregnant with Reed we intentionally did not prevent getting pregnant again.\u00a0 Now we have Alison too!\u00a0 Praise the Lord for his goodness!<\/p>\n

So that is why Mother’s Day is better than all the holidays put together.\u00a0 God has given me everything I could have ever hoped for.\u00a0 Even on the really challenging days I am usually\u00a0able to keep my gratitude at the front of my mind.\u00a0 It helps to keep me from getting too frustrated with that little 2 year old when he wants to wear shorts in January, or with Alison when she thinks it’s time to play at 3am.<\/p>\n

Being a Mother is the single greatest gift I have ever received.\u00a0 Now my job is to make sure I honor this gift by honoring this gift.\u00a0 All I want is to raise kind, generous, loving children…who love football and Jesus!!!<\/p>\n

JB<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mother’s Day truly is the most important holiday (except Easter) for me.\u00a0 I would rather celebrate Mother’s Day than my birthday, and I don’t think that will ever change for the rest of my life. My entire life all I wanted was to be a mom and raise a family.\u00a0 That sounds so archaic, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,13,4,5,8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alison","category-family","category-holidays","category-julie","category-randy","category-reed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/family\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/family\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/family\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/family\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/family\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1531"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/family\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1542,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/family\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1531\/revisions\/1542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/family\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/family\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.randybaldwin.com\/family\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}