So then.  It’s been a while, no?

I have said before that this usually means an existential crisis.

Ah, existential crises are for other people now, I’m afraid.  I just don’t have the time.  Or the energy.  In fact, I have not written because our house is in quite the opposite of an existential crisis.  It is full of life.  No, actually, it is full of LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIFE!  It is bursting to the brims with LIFE!  If you try to ignore the LIFE here, it reaches out and smacks you around a little bit, it is so vibrant. 

TheologyBaby made her way into the world a day before she was due, proving that she and I are indeed intrinsically linked, as I complete pretty much everything the day before it’s due.  Why should gestation be any different?  And one day, when I am organized again and I post over at TheologyMama, I will tell the tale of TheoBaby’s entrance into the world.  A long story short:  I didn’t think I was in labor, so my husband and I walked over to the hospital to check.  (No, really.  Secretly I walked because in case I was in labor, I wanted to be able to say I walked to the hospital to give birth.  Because, dude, how bad ass is that?) Turns out I was!  I kept trying to talk them into letting me go home, but the baby wasn’t responding to non stress tests.  A conversation between me and the nurse:

Nurse:  “Here, drink this sugary drink to get her moving.”

Me:  “Uh, yeah.  Gonna take more than apple juice to get her to wake up.”

Nurse:  “No, this does the trick.  Unless you eat a lot of sugar, tee hee!”

Me:  “Let me put it this way--you know that gestational diabetes drink?  The one that makes most people throw up because it’s so sweet?  Yeah, I slammed that bad boy back and kind of wanted more.”

Nurse:  ?

Needless to say, TheologyBaby was all, “Yeah?  Apple Juice?  Sister please, not worth my tiny fetal . . .zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”

Then I proceeded with my unmedicated childbirth.  Because I attended a good 50 hours of woman spirit rising hypnobirthing classes and, so help me, I was going to use them because insurance only reimbursed me for 90 dollars of them.  Apparently only one percent of women who give birth where I did actually choose to go unmedicated, because everyone there kept saying how I was this warrior goddess for doing it.  The epidural guy walked in while I was pushing and asked that I sign a consent form.  I heard Peter say, “Uh, she doesn’t want one.” He was confused, thinking he had really screwed up, because he heard that I was giving birth and he hadn’t gotten that form signed.  So I guess he figured better late than never?  I will never know.

Then I returned to work two weeks after giving birth not out of badassness, but because I did not want to lose the roof over my head.  This is not something I would recommend, friends.  It leads one to go through one’s work life with a sort of raw honesty that doesn’t really please people.  Raw honesty that does not translate well into memos OR emails.  Go figure.

And finally I am returning to dissertation writing because theology is more interesting when written by a person who does not sleep and is covered in another person’s excrement.  I write keeping in mind the Apostle Paul, as I have learned to be content no matter what the circumst . . . WHAT IS THAT STAIN ON MY COUCH?

Yup.  I’ll be writing moral wisdom for the ages.  Hopefully some of that will end up here as well. Many thanks to those 8 people a day who come here despite my hiatus.  I write for you.  And for Travis, who drops by for new entries via RSS or something similar.