O Lord, our Lord how majestic is your name in all the earth.

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moom and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him,… that you care for him?

Psalm 8: 1 & 3

I am in awe that our Abba Father is so very involved in our lives. He is not a distant God who does not care. He is God with us, God among us, God for us, God in us through the incredible shed blood of his Son Jesus and the Holy Spirit whom he has sent.

I am thankful for so many answered prayers in the last 24 hours. God, our God of miracles and wonders is still doing miracles and performing wonders today. I have witnessed it and I am in awe. We give you all the glory Father God.

Have a blessed day today and drop us a line if there is something we can pray about for you.

It is absolutely incredible - no that’s not a strong enough word - miraculous how quickly newborn infants grow!
Vancouver is sitting very pretty under a beautiful blanket of snow right now (see the pics in the gallery). So, loving the snow as I do (comes from my Prairie roots) Anna and I ventured out on Thursday afternoon. We walked down to the health nurse to have her weighed. She is already 11 pounds! She was 7 pounds 10 ounces at birth for those of you that do not recall her birth weight. We also measured her from the top of her head to her heel this afternoon and she is 22 inches long - she was 19 inches at birth.

Thank you for loving and caring about us enough to continuing checking for updates on the Batemans. All three of us are doing very well. Rob and I are being stretched as we learn how to be a family of three. God has such interesting ways of teaching us things about ourselves doesn’t He? Top of the list would be marriage and running a close second would be parenthood. Thankfully Rob and I both love learning. I was telling Rob’s physiotherapist the other day that all the stresses of working don’t even come close to being as challenging as becoming a new parent - and I have a very easy babe to care for - I can’t imagine colic - or twins!

Anyway, for any expectant or new moms out there - I highly recommend reading Secrets of the Baby Whisperer. Email me if you want more info but I’m telling you - this approach to helping you understand your newborn is brilliant! It also helps to get your babe sleeping through the night as soon as your particular child is ready for it. Anna is only 6 weeks old and has already had a few 6 hour sleeps at night and two 7.5 hour sleeps. What that means to this woman who has been working on 2 hours at a time is hard to express in words.

I’ll close by sharing an email that a beautiful friend from church named Kirstin sent to Anna immediately following her birth:

Anna,
… I know this will be a time of adjusting for you. New smells, louder noises, colder air, even more physical work! The amount of learning required by you in the next 5 years puts us all to shame.

Perhaps, you may feel like a refugee, leaving your perfect home in the wages of birth. However, that experience, as it was for us all, is our/your greatest transition as you seach and find your Creator. Now I hope you realize the many blessings that you have recieved in your first 24 hours and the many more you will gather in the days and years to come…”

What a beautiful, inspired way of looking at new birth.

Love and blessings to you this day!

The eve of the birth of our Saviour. Imagine Mary on that cold night, birth pains racking her young body.

Having given birth just 4 short weeks ago, I feel I can at least partly imagine her pain, but more so her anticipation. But Mary was different. She knew. She knew she was giving birth to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. How she must have so desired to see His sweet face.

I was singing Anna to sleep just 5 minutes ago and after singing Jesus Loves Me (which seems to calm her and put her to sleep so fast) I decided to sing Oh Little Town of Bethlehem. Ponder these beautiful words today as a poem rather than a song. The Lord bless you and keep you this Christmas.

Oh Little Town of Bethlehem how still we see thee lie
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.
Yet in thy dark streets shineth the Everlasting Light
The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonite.

For Christ is born of Mary and gathered all above; while mortals sleep, the angels keep their watch of wondering love.
O morning stars together proclaim the Holy Birth and praises sing to God the King and peace to men on earth.

How silently, how silently the wonderous gift is given.
So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of His heaven.
No ear may hear His coming, but in this world of sin where meek souls will recieve Him still, the dear Christ enters in.

O Holy child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray.
Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels, the great glad tidings tell;
“Oh come to us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel"!

Where children pure and happy pray to the Blessed Child.
Where misery cries out to thee, Son of the mother mild.
Where charity stands watching and faith holds wide the door,
The dark night wakes, glory breaks and Christmas comes once more.

Amen

We’ve passed the two week mark in the life of our little Anna and we are all doing AWESOME! Anna seems to be settling in nicely to about a 3 hour routine. She wakes up voracious, has a bit of awake time during the day and then goes back to sleep for approximately 2 hours. She then starts the whole process over again at about the 3 hour mark. In the nights she eats and goes straight back to sleep so I am getting about 2 hours of sleep at a time and I am doing fine on that. I am also feeling so good! My body almost doesn’t know it was pregnant just two short weeks ago and I am within 5 pounds of my pre-pregnancy weight already! Breastfeeding is incredible!!

Rob is the most handsome, proud and beautiful daddy you could ever hope to meet. He absolutely adores Anna.

Our home will never be the same and we are so thankful for that! Anna has brought so much wonder and amazement into our lives it is hard to put into words. She smiles freely (and for all those doubters who think it’s gas or some other thing, I beg to differ, she really does smile just for the sake of smiling).

We went to see Dr. Carkner yesterday for her two week checkup and he is amazed at how beautiful she is and how well she is doing. He said whatever we are doing, it’s the right thing and to keep it up. Anna is already 9 pounds and is a very happy and contented baby. It feels so nice to get a good report from the doctor because WOW do I ever feel like a baby myself - never having done this before.

We look forward now to Grandma and Grandpa Fehr coming to visit their new grandaughter. They will arrive just in time for my birthday on December 15th!

And then Christmas is only 10 days away.

This year, like no other year before it, we look forward to the celebration of Christmas. Saviour of the world, King of Kings and Lord of Lords, born to us as a child. What an incredible and amazing God we serve.

Hello All,
Welcome to our blog. This is my first attempt at blogging so bear with me as I learn the ropes. Clay, thank you a million times over for putting this together for us. It looks beautiful. For those of you that haven’t seen our precious daughter, there is a link on the left side of the screen called “bateman gallery” go there to see our most recent family pictures.

I took the picture at the top of the blog just a couple of weeks ago. It is called Como lake and it’s just two blocks from our new home. Rob and I love to run and walk there. I’m sure Anna and I will be spending many happy hours at the little playground beside the lake in the coming years as well.

Anna … How awesome that my first blog entry gets to be about one of the most profound things that has ever happened to my life.

Our little Anna is the most amazing gift from our Gracious Heavenly Father. I wanted to give you a little background to her name and how we received it. Her name means “grace upon grace and truth”

I have been praying almost from the beginning of the pregnancy that the Lord would give us the name for our baby. Therefore, we have not spent any time at all reading baby name books or trying to “figure out” what to name our child, we just felt confident that God would provide it. We had no idea if we were having a boy or a girl (you might guess that from the colors in the baby room) : )

One morning in late September Rob was reading to me the account of Christ’s birth in Luke. Jesus was 8 days old when he circumcised he was then taken to Jerusalem for the purification offering and to be dedicated. At the temple there was a prophetess named Anna who knew Jesus was the promised Messiah and after she had seen the Lord in the temple, she told everyone about Jesus. When Rob had finished reading he said to me “What do you think about the name Anna?” and I said “I really like it but I need to know what it means.” So I pulled out my massive concordance with the Greek and Hebrew dictionary that I use for my bible studies. I looked it up … it means GRACE. That did it for me. “Yes, I love the name that will be our daughters name if we have a girl.” We both felt thrilled and confident that we had just recieved our girls name. The next day I was doing my devotions and working with the Greek and Hebrew definitions when my mind wandered a little and I went back to look up Anna again in the concordance. Then I looked up all the incidences of the word Grace in the bible and my eye fell on two verses: John 1:16 & 17.
“And from his fullness we have all recieved grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”
I read these verses and wept. For those of you that have walked the difficult road with Rob and I through the worst of our marriage problems, you will know that it is the redeeming work of our Heavenly Father and His grace that has seen us through the trials to the most incredible two years. It was the truth that set us free to find one another and have our marriage restored. Not just restored but changed into something neither of us could possibly even have hoped for or imagined.

So I quickly looked up how you say grace in the Greek. It is spelled Charis (we say it with a hard K like the beginning of the word Charismatic). I thought that was so incredibly beautiful and the verses had impacted me in such a meaningful way that I couldn’t wait for Rob to wake up so that I could share with him that I thought I had just received Anna’s second name. Of course, he felt the same way about it and then he asked me “how do you say ‘truth’ in the greek?” I looked it up and it is Aletheia. There wasn’t a moment of indecision, we both knew that it was complete. I couldn’t have chosen such meaningful and beautiful names if I had scoured every baby name book in the world and so we take no credit for the beautiful name of our daughter. Her name, just as she is, was a perfect gift from God.

Anna = grace
Charis = the greek word for grace
Aletheia = the greek word for truth
Grace upon grace and truth

Rob and I are two of the most thankful and blessed people on the face of the earth. Thank you Lord God.

Welcome to the Bateman Blog. Check back for news about the Bateman family.