Disclaimer:  This website is so useful for keeping all of our precious family and friends updated on what's going on in our sweet daughter's life, but it is also an online scrapbook that we are keeping for Allana to have one day.  So by virtue of that, sometimes you'll get to read more of our intimate thoughts and conversations than you might otherwise.  Thank you for joining us on this wonderful adventure, and do know that you are just reading the words that we are thinking out loud.

This is our favorite age yet - there is NOTHING we are not enjoying about the stage Allana is in right now.  She's very verbal for her age, so there's not a lot of communication frustration.  She sleeps from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m., and will sometimes let us snooze until 9 a.m.  She eats three meals a day at the table with us, and enjoys almost everything she eats, saying, "Yummy!" or "I like it!"  She laughs and plays and loves to read books and run around the house or the yard....everything is just delightful, to the point that we are sometimes selfish of her time and consider it a sacrifice when we are away from her for even a few hours.

So although we know we would like to have another baby and we would like for Allana to be a big sister at some point in the future, we cannot imagine sharing this time that we are spending with her with another child. 

(Not to mention...where would another kid fit in this tiny place?  I mean, seriously, we live in 900 square feet, and 800 of it is full of stuff!  And Dan works two jobs and is school full-time and we barely make ends meet each month.  This might not be the best timing.)

All along, we've thought that we'd like them to be 3 or 4 years apart.  We've got a few months before we need to really start thinking about conceiving, but still....it's coming up faster than I think we realized.

We're just so caught up in the stage she's in right now - we couldn't be enjoying it more!  We talk daily about how rich our lives are, with each other and family and friends and church.  But we don't want to be selfish.  We know that the relationship between siblings is mighty - because we experience it ourselves.  We want her to have brothers and/or sisters, and we don't want there to be a huge gap between them. 

This is tougher than we thought it would be.  All we know at this moment is that the Lord told us when the right time was for us to have Allana.  He made it perfectly clear that we would conceive...and we did, immediately.  Right now, our prayer is that He would again be clear with us, and that He would trade our selfish hearts for a heart like His. 

What a gift our one daughter is....how much richer our lives will be when He gives us another child.  It's hard to fathom.