Journal update

Here's a brief journal entry about the birth of Timothy, adventures with the kids, and my job.

It’s hard for me to believe that I haven’t written at all this year yet. I’ve helped the kids a bit—but I guess we’ve just not managed to adjust our Sunday schedule with the afternoon church change to make it happen.

Anyway—I should at least write something about the birth of my 5th child, Timothy Eugene. He’s as cute as can be. Becky is an incredible person, with courage and strength that’s really amazing. People in Church keep calling her a pioneer—for good reason. She’s really amazing at handling crises. And has guts—drove to Colorado with a van full of kids yesterday!

I remember vividly holding her around the back with my arms around her shoulders and squeezing her to support as she sat on the birthing stool and pushed to help Timothy come out. I could just feel her working and putting all the energy and effort she had into it. Plus I can tell it must be incredibly painful. The whole experience was humbling to me and recommitted me to doing the best I can as a father and to helping her. Just wish I could do more to help.

Alaina has been darling holding and taking care of Timothy, and the boys also have been very helpful. She’s a bit of an adventure, though because she wants to help so much—carrying him around, changing his diaper, doing so many things like that when she’s just not big enough to be completely safe. The other day I acquiesced to her on the diaper-changing, and allowed her to help me change him right on our bed. Big mistake! Soon after I got his diaper off, he peed and it squirted on his clothes, the bed sheets (we don’t have any kind of plastic protection on our foam pad), and my pillow. I had to change the sheets, and wash my pillow before I could go back to bed!

Last week I got a raise! It's pretty modest, as expected, but still nice to have. It’s interesting, this year I was rated “meets expectations,” last year I was rated, “exceeds expectations,” but the raise this year was exactly the same as the one last year. Good thing I'm working for lots of reasons other than the money. It keeps getting harder to leave this job, and I feel I can really do some good things, even though there are plenty of frustrations. Plus, I enjoy the flexibility and opportunity to meet and learn from great people, and it’s nice to actually have a decent job with benefits.

Family Blog/Journal

I've been remiss lately in not keeping my own journal updated, and have noticed many people have started using blogs as basically a way of keeping a record of their life and thoughts. And, as I've thought about my journal, I've decided I don't really want to write anything that I wouldn't want my immediate family to read anyway.

It turns out it's now free and easy to do a private blog that only a few people access--with no technical know-how, and you can have multiple people publish to it.

I've invited all our Hadfield family members and given each of them permission as publishers to write directly to this blog. I'm hoping we can each post entries, favorite websites, even pictures and videos.

I see this as a different purpose from our discussion group we tried awhile ago. I'd like to see this as a shared family journal--to just give updates on what's happening, share pictures, and if we want, we can also discuss various topics.

This is, I hope, a great opportunity for us to learn from each other and share news. If you want, you can use it as your family history journal, like I'm going to with mine.