Rachel

The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children. G.K. Chesterton Pt. 2 🫶🏻

Just figured out how many deportations we may need.

Your wife should be your personal oracle, sharing all her crazy dreams and impressions and intuitions with you. Whilst also analysing people using logic, cunning and wisdom. Always aligned with you, protecting you in her own way. Cute cunning oracle wife.

Do H1B’s identify with this heritage?

Roman soldier looking in the empty tomb after Jesus got up outta there

Husband is starting the mowing season again today 1/3 yards. Here comes my seasonal depression.

I saw it in relation to labor that read "this is my body broken for you, this is my blood shed for you"

Will pastors encourage financially sound women to marry repentant men drowning in gambling debts from their previous un-sanctified state?

This is way, WAY too much folding. Folding clothes for multiple little kids is a complete waste of time and will eat your entire day. Folded stacks fail the instant they make contact with a child's hands anyway. Fold the big stuff. Hang the nice stuff. The rest is in God's hands.

Tolkien really got it with the Elves, Men, dwarfs, and hobbits. Because I just saw a 4'10 pregnant body builder and she was definitely a dwarf.

When you meet a baby in public, you can tell if they're a playable character or an npc. When you recognize a real one, the code is to tell the parent, "(S)he's so observant!"

you see a toddler pass out mid-morning, gripping a tiny half eaten muffin, and when they wake up later, they just start eating the muffin again. this is real freedom. there are wild horses less free than this

The science of fetal microchimerism should have broken the internet by now. It hasn’t. When I read about a research I was so curious to know what’s actually happening. Fetal cells — carrying the child’s own DNA — cross into the mother’s bloodstream during pregnancy and never fully leave. They embed into her organs. Her heart muscle. Her brain tissue. Researchers have found a child’s living cells inside mothers in their 90s, from pregnancies six decades old. The child left the womb. The cells didn’t. And they don’t just sit there. They migrate toward damage. Women with heart injuries show fetal cells concentrated at the wound site. Women with thyroid disease show their children’s cells inside the affected tissue. The body that built the child gets tended to, in return, by the child’s own cells. Nobody designed this consciously. Evolution quietly built a repair system out of the mother-child bond itself. The brain side of this is equally staggering. Pregnancy triggers gray matter reorganization — a structural rewiring that sharpens threat detection, deepens empathy, fundamentally alters how a mother processes the world. These changes persist for years after birth. Possibly permanently. A mother’s nervous system doesn’t return to its factory settings. It was updated by the experience of carrying another person, and that update sticks. The part worth sitting with longest — women who experienced pregnancy loss carry fetal cells too. The cellular merging doesn’t require a birth. It doesn’t require years of raising someone. Those cells remain regardless of what happened after. A mother grieving a child she never brought home is grieving someone biologically still present inside her. The world consistently underestimates that grief. The science says we have no business doing that. Mothers always knew the connection didn’t end at birth. Turns out it doesn’t end at the cellular level either.

there’s a woman who died in the 1800s in the graveyard i often walk to. she and her husband are buried beside about a dozen of their babies who died before, during, or right after birth. sometimes i like to talk to her when i visit to tidy their graves and pray for them. i wonder what advice she’d give me about motherhood, my faults, and my various trials. i always feel a sense of perspective after i talk to her that helps me to be a better, more patient, more cheerful, and more grateful mother. i like to think of her as a friend of mine. i hope that someday we’ll get to be mom friends in heaven, surrounded by all of our babies.

You bring in a midwife so that your actual wife has someone to mog while birthing, which is good for the baby.

One of our most quoted quotes right now is from our three-year-old daughter when she was FaceTiming my parents after the death and burial of her big brother’s dog, Jake. “What happened to Jake?” my dad asked her. “He dead,” she said. “He is??” “Yeah, he gone,” she added. “Man,” said Dad. “He in da mud,” she finished. My mom said she wants those words on her tombstone. She dead. She gone. She in da mud.

Your parents either stay your parents or become your friends

Look, if your teenage daughter has a moustache, moms, please teach them how to wax or bleach it. It feels so cruel to allow them to run around looking like Tom Selleck.

My experiment of wearing my husband's favorite colors to see if he tells me I'm pretty has concluded that yes if I want to hear it more I have to wear his favorite colors. I don't think this applies to women.