Haiti

The news of the earthquake - mostly the human suffering because of it - has made my heart ache the past couple of days. Watching the images of ravaged buildings, rampant looting, and rising death counts in the midst of the world's deepest poverty literally has brought tears to my eyes. Those dead, dying, maimed and suffering are someone's sons, daughters, husbands, and wives. Loved. Maybe my soul aches because I've seen the Dominican Republic, the 'rich' country on the island, and have seen its' physical poverty. Maybe it aches because I feel guilty, undeserving, that somehow I've won the lottery and was born in the US. But as much as my heart aches, I know God, who Knows each person affected, aches infinitely more. He aches not just for their temporal physical well-being, but for their eternal well-being. He sees this blood & sin stained world as worth rescuing. He proved it - not just on the cross, but in my life. Thankfully for the Haitians, and for all those who realize they need Rescuing, as Yancey said, Grace, like water, flows to the lowest part.

Thanks Mal

Last weekend we thoroughly enjoyed having Mal come over to work her magic on lil' Brenna. Not only does Mal have an adroit photographer's eye, she has a remarkable ability to mold small baby bodies into whatever position she chooses. Judging from the way she effortlessly worked with our daughter, she either slipped Brenna some sedatives or somehow cast her into a hypnotic trance. No matter. Well done, and thank you Malissa! (this is not a paid advertisement, although we would highly recommend her for any of your creative photography needs!)

Click here to see a sneak peak

Welcome to our home, Brenna Marie

The events of Sunday, December 27th, will be remembered with great fondness and just a tinge of fear in our hearts for the rest of our days. Five minutes after the conclusion of church, where Melis played the piano, she felt a big goosh. After abruptly ending her conversation without explanation or excuse, she walked nervously to the bathroom where an impromptu meeting of her Mom, Michelle & Kristin was called. It didn't take long to assess the situation and quickly stop at home to gather some clothes, then head off to the hospital.

At the hospital, we waited. And waited. After Pitocin was started, we waited some more. And did a 300 piece Austria puzzle. And watched the movie Earth. After a new bag of Pitocin and some uncomfortable membrane stripping by Dr. Burtner, finally by 9pm, things were rolling.

Things got rolling so quickly, actually, that Melis nearly delivered in the middle of getting her epidural started - they barely got around to getting the drip going. As she was getting it, the contractions got intense enough that the pushing started. One push after getting laid back down on the bed, a head full of dark hair popped out. A first year resident made the catch, and the doc mosied on in a few minutes later.
Brenna Marie weighed in at 6lbs 14oz, at 19" long. Because she was four weeks early, I had a feeling she might face some difficulties early on. Unfortunately that hunch was right. After spending an hour or so getting acquainted with Mom, it was determined that her blood glucose was abnormally low, so they took her to the Special Care room for monitoring. She was strongly encouraged to drink formula as she waited for Mom's milk to come in (ok, I pretty much force-fed her). After a few hours there they released her back to Mom. But a few hours later her glucose fell again, and after four failed attempts to start an IV (poor girl), they decided to simply keep monitoring her & keeping her well fed. It took a few more hours, but she came around and stabilized. One of my most memorable two hours of the last few days were sitting in Special Care with our nearly naked baby under the heat lamps as I watched, read & prayed. She was attached to monitors that periodically started honking when her oxygen saturation, breath rate, or body temp would drop too low. Melis was getting some much-needed & deserved sleep, as I looked on nervously - helplessly - trusting that this delicate life was going to be used by our sovereign God who loves her. There's a lot of comfort in that.
This is the same hat that Abigail filled out very nicely. Brenna will need to do a little growing before it fits her. Compare to this similar pose of Abigail Joy.
Abigail has been a very loving, gentle, & curious big sister.

One Tuesday the pediatrician went back & forth in the decision of letting her come home. They were worried about jaundice (common in preemies who have had quite a bit of bruising), but she let us go about 44 hours after birth, and seems to be doing great.

Christmas pics on New Year's Eve with Grandpa & Grandma Utah.

Little stocking stuffers.

How do you have a baby and look this good four days later?!?

Check out Brenna's sour apple face ;-)Here's to a pleasantly unexpected & amazingly blessed Christmas & New Year in the Koning house.

Every Day's an Adventure

Abee the mobster

Making tasty Christmas Trees at playgroup

Abee & Tom sporting some creative wrapping paper
Melis @ 35 weeks

It's been much-anticipated & long-awaited. . .but it's almost done

Abee's new big girl room

tada!

Catchin' Up

Grandma & Grandpa Idaho did a great job of hosting the whole gang in early November. Yup - we're a full month behind on blogging. This will serve as a quick synopsis of a few highlights since then.

Abigail, Bailey, & Dillon

Cap'n Abee

We also had a great time here in Oly with G&G Utah for Thanksgiving. Even though we didn't get any pictures of the great goose we cooked for the occasion, Abigail did have a good time making crafts with them.

It didn't quite look like Christmas outside with as much blue sky as we've had here the last couple weeks.

After a careful inspection, it gets her stamp of approval.

Don't worry, walking on the top of the car isn't a regular occurrence for her. Of course I promised Melis I wouldn't ever take my eyes off her ;-)Is it just me, or does she vaguely resemble an evil villain?

And today we had snow. OK, so we really didn't have to shovel our deck. . .but we don't get too many chances to use our snow shovel around here! Abee was a little apprehensive, but managed to have fun for almost 10 minutes outside before bolting for the warmth of the house.
Matty Sioux, on the other hand, could have played in this stuff for hours.
You know what's coming. . .

Yup. That's my girl!!!

And now we're caught up.

We'Re NuTS

As we contemplated what to do with our free Saturday, we checked the weather and saw there was only a 25% chance of rain until noon in today. So we ate a leisurely breakfast and hit the road around 9:30am, grabbed a coffee (bk), chai (mk) & choc milk (ak), filled the tank with gas and drove east, with NW Trek in our sights. We should have outfitted the car with a snorkel first though. It poured, as seen in the photo below as we first arrived.

So we ran to the Cheney Center and crawled through logs, learned about salamanders & snakes, and did a caterpillar craft.
Gopher snake (same as a Bull snake).
Then we ran to the tram for the big animal tour.
I'd like to say this was a bugle. . .but it was just a rainy-day yawn.

Thar's deer owt thar!

Pappy & The Ladies.

During dinner tonight, back in our warm, toasty house, we asked Abee what her favorite animal was. The first thing she said was the baby bison.

Golden.

Three minutes after this photo was taken, she was asleep in the car. The hot topic on the way home was a name for Baby K #2. Still undecided. . .but the choices are narrowing. 11 weeks to decide.

Weekend in Forks

Facebook has taken over as the easiest place to share pictures, but there's something about a blog that seems more like a journal. Someday I hope a company like Shutterfly makes it easy to print blogsites. It's nice to look back, reminisce, and see where God has allowed us to grow physically & spiritually through life's experiences.

A couple weekends ago we went to the Olympic Peninsula for a three-day vacation. On the way we stopped at The Olympic Game Farm, where all kinds of crazy critters, like this groundhog, live.

Square-lipped rhino.

Yup. Griz.

This is the only place I've ever been where they encourage the feeding of omnivores much larger than myself.

He is, indeed, waving. For bread.

The fence was four feet high. Tops.

For those of you familiar with the Twilight series, yes, we did read the first book of the four-part series. For those of you not in the know, it's a vampire book that every high-school girl in America has read. And many adult chics too. I suffered through it, somehow. OK, Melis has a way of making even a book like that entertaining. Thanks for the good read'n, Babes ;-)

Was that a vampire?! Or an Ewok?

For the four years that we've lived here, I've wanted to get some pictures of the fog in old-growth forest like this. The forecast had called for rain & possible fog most of the weekend, and I wasn't disappointed.

A Washington icon - Sol Duc Falls.

The water was raging today, more so than the previous times we've been here. It was actually quite a feat not allowing water droplets to build up on my lens.

It was getting pretty dark as we came back. So dark that this picture was a 60-second exposure.

It rained all day the second day, so instead of a trip to Shi Shi beach, we opted for the Hoh Rain Forest. This place gets 150 inches of rain every year. There were 7 in the previous three days to us being there.

And it rained most of the time we were there. . .but Abee stayed happy, warm, & dry under the protection of the hood of the backpack.

The sitka spruce is the dominant tree in the area, but there is a smattering of maples also, see behind us here.

She really took a liking to bridges on this trip. In fact, it was hard to get her to stop going back & forth & back & forth & back & ok, you get the picture. Thankfully we weren't on any kind of schedule.

We had lunch in the Hoh campground, within 50 yards (sometimes a lot closer) of three bull elk.

La Push.

Still on day two, it was dry here at Second Beach, but being on the coast, the wind was blowing like crazy. The tide wasn't quite in our favor, but we did spot a few starfish and thousands of anenomes & muscles.

We hiked around 4 miles total that day, and Melis, during the last half mile or so, started having pretty strong braxton-hicks. I thought I was either going to have to deliver Baby #2 myself, or race back into the Forks clinic to have Dr. Cullen (for those of you well versed in Twilight) take care of business. But we took it slow, ordered in pizza for dinner, and it passed. The contractions, that is. Not the baby.

On our way home we tried to go the back way to Lake Ozette, but our TomTom took us on a bunch of dead-end logging roads that were fun & beautiful (and rather remote), but didn't get us to where we wanted to go. So we bailed on that idea and drove to Hurricane Ridge instead.

This was not Abigail Joy's best day, but as long as she was swinging around & flying through the air, she was pretty happy. So we got a good workout.

I snapped this just as we were leaving, and less than a minute after this image froze the moment in time, the clouds rolled in and ensconced the view of the mountains.