In the first part of our story I recounted how Jeni and I had to come through some hard times together when moving to Scotland and how Jeni first let me know that she wanted a baby. As you can imagine, I was quite surprised by this turn of events. I have always wanted to have kids at some point in our marriage. Jeni used to be dead set against the idea. She claimed that she didn't really like young kids and that young kids didn’t really like her, and that life would just be easier without dealing with them. She also said that she was scared of taking the responsibility for a new, fragile life. Jeni felt that we could probably have kids sometime down the road after she established her career, but that instead of having our own we could help pull older kids out of the foster care system through adoption. This had been Jeni’s position since before we got married and I did my best at every opportunity to try to change her mind.

I’m not sure if anything I ever said to Jeni had any real effect. Thankfully, I received backup to help advance my cause in the form of our new neighbors the Burnses and the Roths. When we met them the Roth family had one kid about a year old, and the Burns family had two toddlers with a new infant on the way. It became clear immediately that Jeni’s claim that no kids liked her was completely unfounded. One-and-a-half year old Isaiah Burns went absolutely crazy for Jeni. I even felt a little slighted, since I was the one who sat down on the floor and played with him and his sister every time we visited. Now don’t get me wrong, he liked me too, but if I ever came up to their place alone, the first word out of his mouth was “Jeni?” Jeni had found a little kid aside from her nephews who really liked her, and she found out that she really liked him, too.

We also got to experience the birth of the Burns family’s new baby. Jeni and I both learned a lot more about infants and their needs. Primarily we learned that they’re not as fragile as you’d think at first. We each got a lot of hands on time holding, feeding and burping new baby Micaiah. Emma was more than happy to answer all our baby related questions with her wealth of knowledge as both a mother of three and a pediatrics nurse. Most of those questions were about how to keep the baby happy and healthy and how to know what he wants and needs when he can’t even talk yet. Emma assured us that even though they can’t talk, they can still communicate. One of Jeni’s biggest fears had been that of responsibility for the baby’s physical needs, and Emma helped her put many of those fears to rest.

The experiences listed above were enough change Jeni’s mind about having children someday, but she didn’t feel the desire for children someday; she felt the desire for children right now. The final influencing factor was God. She prayed about her new feelings as she became more comfortable with the idea of having children. Her time in prayer grew into a feeling of conviction that this was the time to have children. Perhaps sometime after Jeni is feeling better and is caught up with the school she missed she could add her own perspective on this. I have obviously given a straightforward retelling of the bare facts and glossed over the very real and very personal experience of entering a prayerful dialogue with God and being convicted about how to live.

Even though I had been an advocate for children at some point in our marriage, I wasn’t ready to do it right at that moment. There were still a lot of things to think through. Could we afford it? How would it fit in with school for Jeni? What would it mean for my own identity and my plans? Are we doing this just because our landlord won’t let us have a cat? At this point the decision to have a baby or not was up to me. If I said no, Jeni would be disappointed but life would go on. If I said yes, every thing would change in a big way forever. The next post will go into how I came to the decision to have a baby, and what I think it will mean to me.