Drivin and Drinkin

A few nights ago Mike, Nora, my dad and I went to the store across town to pick up a few things. In an earlier post I talked about the song tiaws that we use to get around the city while we are visiting Chiang Mai. When we came out of the store there were a bunch of song tiaws lined up, but the drivers were no where to be found. We hung out for a while and then one guy came up to us from the restaurant across the street. He asked us where we wanted to go and then went back to a table of men drinking beer, where they discussed who would take us, and one guy came over and drove us home. We were half way home before we realized that it was possibly a bad idea to catch a ride home with a someone who had just finished drinking. Stuff like that just seems so normal these days.

Nora

It'd be cool to say we had some God-moment for picking our daughter's name, but really it was the first name we both really liked as we looked forward to having kids. The judge is still out on the boy names for us, so we're glad Nora came out the way she did after both Thai and Chinese doctors said "maybe" a girl.

As we were exploring possible boy names we came across the meaning of Nora in our handy dandy baby-names iphone app. Nora means "light." It's part of the Hebrew word Menorah, which you know to be the set of candles Jewish people light at Hanakkuh. It's been really fun in recent weeks and days to be drawn to the meaning and significance of light in the Bible and to have our prayers for our daughter be the same. As you pray for her we'd love for you to join with us in these two things:

Matthew 5:14-15 says: "¹⁴ “You are the light of the world. A town built on a hill cannot be hidden. ¹⁵ Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl. Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house." (Also: Isaiah 49:6)

What a blessing it would be to have a child that's a light to her friends, teachers, c0-workers, and to the people in the ends of the earth. Also our prayer comes from the following verses:

Psalm 119:105 - "Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path." (Also Psalm 19:8; 27:1).

Light reveals what is true about our surroundings. When light isn't pure or bright it can lie to us and make it hard to see the right path. God's light reveals lies not seen in darkness and reveals clearly what is the truth path when there are so many. This is a challenge for everyone, but especially as a young woman, she needs to clearly see in all situations what is truth and what is a lie so that she will stay far away from lies about God, life, or herself that are just too easy to believe. John 8:31 says that the truth will set us free. There's so much freedom that comes with knowing that you're in the truth and on the right path. Our hope is that she will always see truth illuminated by God alone and find freedom in that.

Nora Jane Easton

We had our baby! Nora Jane Easton. She is 8 lbs. 13 oz. 20 Inches. Here she is!

Nora means "light." Our prayer is that she would be a light to the world and that the light of truth would make her path clear. Jane is my mom's name and we want to honor her love in our lives through Nora's middle name.

We'll post more later, but we finally got her to sleep and we need to also!

You're killin me Smalls

And by Smalls, I mean huge and by huge, I mean our baby. Ok here's the skinny, and by skinny I mean fatty. I'll stop doing that now. What I'm trying to say is that my womb must be awesome, cause she is taking her sweet time in there. At Monday's Dr. appointment our little (probably) girl weighed in at a whopping 4 kilos! That's 8lbs, 13oz to the layperson. Yup you did the math right, that's 3oz. short of 9 lbs and counting with zero signs of labor. Sweet. Dr. Supachai, (who we like to call SuperDuperchai) is really great and comes highly recomended, but seems to be in no hurry to induce labor or anything like that. We're starting to feel like our chances of a natural delivery are getting smaller as the baby gets bigger, so please pray that she would come soon! Dr. SuperDuperChai's advice? "Walk, and every day tell the baby to come out."