At this exact moment, I am sitting on the couch with a snoozy baby on my chest. I’m sipping hot coffee out of an old travel mug while watching Norah get her own baby packed up and ready for a walk in the stroller. I’m typing with a single thumb on my iPhone while we wait for Jake and Sawyer to get home from kindergarten drop off.

Our rhythms have changed in the past 31 days.

As a person who thrives on routine and expected outcomes, the complete upheaval a newborn brings is always the hardest thing for me to adjust to. “Just take it one day at a time” is not a mantra that comes naturally to me. Even on the good days, you can usually find me anticipating the harder ones.

We’ve done this dance four times now. And, each time even the upheaval has looked vastly different. Here’s one thing that hasn’t changed though: My ability to consume a completely random assortment of information and entertainment in the middle of the night. With Lily, it was Friends reruns and Jimmy Fallon clips, and with Norah, I alternated episodes of Chopped and Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (that was almost 4 years ago, so I feel pretty ahead of the game on that one). As for Sawyer, I watched a lot of Chicago Cubs game summaries as they inched closer to the World Series.

It has been no different with baby Jude, and I thoroughly enjoyed remembering all the places my brain has been ping-ponging around in the last month.

So, without further ado:

Books I Read

The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis

I recently finished compiling my personal collection of The Chronicles of Narnia. I decided to reread the series because I can’t remember the last time I read them and, even more alarmingly, can’t remember if I ever actually finished all the books. I love the way Lewis narrates these stories, and I was especially captivated by his description of the World Between the Woods early on in this one:

“It was the quietest wood you could possibly imagine. There were no birds, no insects, no animals, and no wind. You could almost feel the trees growing. The pool he had just got out of was not the only pool. There were dozens of others–a pool every few yards as far as his eyes could reach. You could almost feel the trees drinking the water up with their roots. This wood was very much alive” (32).

Women of the Word: How to Study the Bible with Both Our Hearts and Our Minds by Jen Wilken

I’ve been thinking for some time that, in my reading of the Bible, I’ve been relying too heavily on studies or devotionals to give me insight or understanding. While I like the thematic approach and wisdom of people like Catherine Martin or Beth Moore, I’ve been wondering lately why I feel as though I can’t read my Bible without the guidance of someone else. I started looking into the inductive method of Bible study and then saw this book recommended repeatedly. Wilken’s suggestions and wisdom are practical and added to a thought process I had already begun churning in my brain.

“I cannot truly be a God-worshipper without loving the Bible deeply and reverently. Otherwise, I worship and unknown god” (147).  

Articles I Clicked

This was my favorite list to round up because it is so obviously the work of a person who has been reading articles at literally all hours of the day. I mean, in the past 31 days, I have gained knowledge about Jimmy Carter, millennial evangelicals, AND the lengths one must go to in order to photograph pandas.

Follow-up question: Can you guess which one of those articles I read in the middle of the night?

• The un-celebrity president: Jimmy Carter shuns riches, lives modestly in his Georgia hometown by Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan
• Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle. by David S. Glosser
• Millennial Evangelicals Diverge from Their Parents’ Beliefs by Eliza Griswold
• The Unusual Difficulties of Photographing Pandas by Alexa Keefe
• Definitely Keep Insulting Your Kids With Sarcasm. Great Idea. by Jen Wilken
• ‘All politics is personal’: Biden recalls his bond with McCain in a bipartisan time by Paul Kane

Things I Watched

Speaking of things you do in the middle of the night when you have a newborn, “Watch Happy Things on YouTube” is one of my survival pro-tips. In the past few weeks, I have found some new things I had never seen before and also returned to some old feel-goods. I couldn’t resist passing them along in case you need an end of the month pick-me-up.

• Lin-Manuel Miranda Wedding Surprise: Since I discovered the existence of this video a few weeks ago, I have already watched it five times because it makes me so happy. As if I didn’t already love Lin-Manuel Miranda enough, he surprised his wife with a rendition of “To Life” from Fiddler on the Roof with their entire bridal party. If you haven’t seen this, stop everything you’re doing and watch it immediately.
• Joe Biden on The View: I actually watched this as it aired live last December and was so moved by the humanity of Joe Biden speaking to Meghan McCain about her dad’s cancer that I returned to it this week in light of John McCain’s death.
• Like Real People Do: Sometimes all you need to brighten your spirits at 3:30 in the morning is a classic So You Think You Can Dance routine. (Or, is that just me?) Full disclosure: I couldn’t remember the name of either of these dancers or the song when I wanted to watch it last week, so I just typed “yellow dress sytycd” into Google and came out a winner 0.49 seconds later.
• Carpool Karaoke with Paul McCartney: Okay, so this one is old news, but given that we just named a baby Jude, Jake and I obviously had to rewatch and sing along with this one.
• The Great British Baking Show: There have been a few nights in which I’ve been up for multiple hours straight, but Paul and Mary kept me company while teaching me about proving and blind baking.
• Journeywomen Podcast: Humor with Holly Mackle and Caroline Saunders: Technically I didn’t watch this one, but I did listen to it the other morning. I didn’t go into it thinking I would take that much away, and, instead, the opposite happened. As someone who tends to get a little too tightly wound about things that don’t really matter, this contained a lot of things I needed to hear, and it also made me laugh.

What I Wrote

NOTHING.

Self-proclaimed maternity leave is FUN and it’s been refreshing to turn my inner taskmaster off.

Continued Upheaval

The baby woke up, so I moved to the floor. Sawyer is back now; Jake dropped him off when he came back for Lily’s forgotten backpack. I finished my coffee and am now typing with two thumbs while Sawyer and Norah play together and ask periodically if it’s “nack time.” Quiet doesn’t keep around here for long.

That’s nothing new though.

The newborn upheaval is expected. It doesn’t catch me off guard like it did the first few times, but it does continue to serve as a reminder that my life is not defined by the circumstances that surround me. It’s nice to have YouTube and my News app to keep me busy in the middle of the night, but those aren’t the things that get me through these long days.

God has continually reminded me in the past few weeks that He is my source of strength and contentment. Everything else might change (see: will change), but He doesn’t.

The same God who created panda bears to be particularly elusive creatures and gave humans a sense of curiosity to try to photograph them is also the same God who is with me every hour of every day. On the hard days. On the good days. On the uneventful ones too.

I’m back on the couch. I can’t tell you how long it’s taken me to write this. The baby is asleep again, my coffee is refilled, and I took a break to play with the two middle kids.

Everything looks different than it did 31 days ago, but also, the things that matter look exactly the same. August has been good to us.