simple hit counter

Dietary changes

Vision Forum Deal of the Day: save 40-90%!

We’re making some changes around here. Calculating our cost for certain meals was part of the motivation, and hubby’s recent weight loss is another. We’ve made some short-term changes in celebration of the changing seasons that we want to continue with: we are enjoying the return of reasonable prices on fresh produce and have exchanged a good portion of our meat & cheese consumption for bananas, cucumbers, tomatoes, oranges, etc.

We don’t eat the average American diet – very few of our foods are prepackaged, and sodas are a rare treat. However, we do go through a lot of sugar and white flour, we eat a lot of meat (including hot dogs, sausage, etc.) and desserts are not chosen with healthful ingredients in mind.

We don’t want to become health nuts (or to borrow a phrase from a cynic I know, Food Pharisees). However, we are trying out some substantial shifts:

  1. There is 1/2 cup of white sugar left in the house, and I don’t intend to buy more right away. We are finding that brown sugar works very nicely in nearly anything from coffee to Grandma’s Wacky Cake. I bought a 25# bag of brown sugar at Costco for the same price/lb as what I normally pay for white sugar. I realize there may be no substantial difference between the two, but I think this might help us develop less of a taste for refined sugar – a step in the right direction.
  2. We don’t eat meat every night for dinner now. This is a huge change!
  3. With the money saved by not consuming 4-7 lbs. of meat every day, we can start every dinner with a large appetizer platter of fresh veggies.
  4. The meat we do eat will be generally less processed. Not organic, but not hot dogs either. We’re looking for a happy medium.
  5. We’re making whole-wheat bread with freshly ground wheat, honey and other healthy stuff.
  6. I have learned to cook beans in my crock pot using the hard water from our well.  I have learned to do this long before I need them so that they will have plenty of time to get soft before I need them.
  7. I will be working fresh ground whole wheat flour into many of our recipes. Like changing brown sugar for white, I’m hoping we will find that many or most recipes can be changed without negatively affecting the results. Unlike changing brown sugar for white, this will represent a substantial change in nutritional value.
  8. Friday night pizza will go on as planned, with crusts made entirely of white flour.

We think we can accomplish most of this without spending more for food than we do already because we’ll be cutting back on some of the more expensive elements in our diet, namely meat and cheese.

We also think we might be crazy (or go crazy) and all fight each other like a pack of sharks for that last bag of cheetohs in the pantry, but we’ll take it a day at a time and see how it goes.

A Child’s Story part 2

Vision Forum Deal of the Day: save 40-90%!

We spent a good half of the afternoon yesterday making this movie.

To those of you who have seen A Child’s Story part 1 this story has no connection to the old one.

It’s just the second movie in our series starring Rachie.


Photo SharingVideo SharingPhoto PrintingPhoto Books

Poetry

Vision Forum Deal of the Day: save 40-90%!

posted by Lydia

Poetry from Treasure Island:

If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold.
If schooners, islands, and maroons
And Buccaneers and buried Gold,
And all the old romance, retold
Exactly in the ancient way,

-So be it, and fall on! If not,
If studios youth one no longer crave,
His ancient appetites forgot,
Kingston, or Ballantyne the brave,
Or Cooper of the wood and wave:
So be it also! And may I
And all my pirates share the grave
where these and their creations lie!

 

Robert Louis Stevenson

 

Knowing history in light of Psalms

Vision Forum Deal of the Day: save 40-90%!

I don’t know history. At least, not as well as I should. As I read through Psalms, I have to conclude that we let ourselves off the hook far too easily. If we know the names and some of the major accomplishments of the founding fathers of our nations; if we know most of the important dates of the last couple of centuries; if we can converse intelligently on current events – then we are tempted to think that we’ve really got a handle on history. Well, that’s the standard I aspire to, and it suddenly seems small and selfish.

The Psalms talk constantly about events that happened 4-10 centuries earlier in a way that makes them sound generally familiar and relatively recent. Think of that; our nation was born just over 200 years ago and we think that’s ancient history. Would you know what I meant if I said I hope he ends up like Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown? You might know that he lost, but would it mean any more to you than that? Do you know why Benedict Arnold became a traitor? Why did Aaron Burr kill Alexander Hamilton in a duel?

God’s people are repeatedly exhorted to know, remember and teach their children of His marvelous acts so that they will know that He is God. If we read our Bible enough, we might remember the humiliating circumstances surrounding the defeat of Sisera and his army (Ps. 83:9, Judges 4). We might understand some of the reasons behind the longterm conflicts between the Israelites and the Edomites, Ishmaelites and Midianites. We might even know what Jephthah (the son of a harlot leading a band of outlaws in the hills) was talking about when he quoted a centuries-old discourse (Judges 11:14-28) between 3 heathen kings and Israel.

But could you do this for your own nation’s history? For events that happened a scant century or two ago? Do we, as a people, know how God was glorified in our history? Do we understand how, why and when His judgment fell upon us as a rebellious people and when and why He lifted it and restored us to His favor? Do we know why our economy, social morality, and educational system, etc. are in a shambles?

The Israelites seem to have known this in their time; and yet they were constantly under judgment for forgetting. Their knowledge of history puts us to shame, but it was still sadly lacking. Is it any wonder that our nation is in trouble?

Oh, praise the Lord, for He is good

Vision Forum Deal of the Day: save 40-90%!

Rejoice with me. I won’t go into detail, but we just found a blessing left for us by God over a year ago – a great and unexpected blessing left by Him in a place we simply never thought to look. A very real and tangible blessing to be used for a very real and tangible purpose.

It comes at a perfect time for us. If we had found it a year ago, we wouldn’t have known what to do with it. When we found it several days ago, we were sure it was for one of very two very exciting purposes, but which? Could it possibly accomplish both? We soon learned that one possibility was no longer possible – this was not a disappointment, but a relief. Now, we think we know exactly why He provided it.

Isn’t His timing always perfect? And aren’t His gifts always perfect?

Every good gift and every perfect gift cometh down from the Father of Lights, with whom there is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.

James 1:17

Quiverfull clarifications

Vision Forum Deal of the Day: save 40-90%!

My post about self-consciously letting God determine our family size stirred up some wonderful thought-provoking comments on both sides of the issue.

Let me clear up a couple of possible misunderstandings:

  • We don’t generally use the Quiverfull label because we feel that this way of life represents a clear Biblical pattern. We don’t think of ourselves as part of a movement; rather we are striving to apply God’s Word to every area of life, including childbearing. I used the label in my post for the same reason that I call myself a Calvinist: I am not a follower of John Calvin, but I do think that he did a good job of summarizing the teachings of Scripture in certain areas.
  • We fully understand that God does not give everyone a large family – even among those who never practice birth control. Although all of us are prone to judge a book by its cover, we have many friends who have small families through no choice of their own, and we strive to avoid jumping to conclusions about where people might stand on the issue. Ann’Re mentioned this in her comment, as did KMC, Hilary and others.
  • We have many friends who disagree with us on this issue. We have many friends who don’t know how we feel about it, and we don’t know where many of our friends stand. This is an issue that often stays between a couple and God, but there is still a right and a wrong answer, and every Christian must strive to apply God’s Word to this (and every) area of life.
  • Yesterday’s comments varied wildly in how they interpreted my post. Some called it kind, sweet, and thoughtful; others said it was merciless, harsh, prideful and judgmental. I tried to speak forthrightly, letting the gospel offend, but I am imperfect. If I was merciless, harsh, prideful or judgmental, please forgive me. If I am wrong, please forgive me; examine the Scriptures and obey them. But if the message offended you and you can’t condemn it from the Scriptures, then you have only 2 choices: obey God or your own will.
  • Caroline mentioned Amy’s chocolate ice cream post, where Amy explains why generalizations don’t always apply to every situation, but Caroline rightly assumes that my post is not meant to be a chocolate ice cream post. If you disagree with my stand on birth control, I think that you are wrong. That’s alright – I still consider you a Christian sister or brother, and you are probably convinced that I am wrong. I’m OK with that. Give your Biblical defense, and I will consider it Biblically. We each must serve God according to the best of our ability and conscience, and God will forgive each of us for our imperfect service to Him.
  • For those with medical conditions that make pregnancy dangerous, let me just reiterate what I said in the first post: If your doctor advised you not to have more children, I understand that yours was a hard decision – but it was a decision nonetheless. You had a choice and you made it. Not everyone obeys their doctor’s advice; not every doctor offers the same advice, and not everyone who goes against the advice of a doctor winds up regretting it. I’m not saying that you should have decided differently. Only that you did, indeed, have and make a choice.
  • We haven’t traveled an entirely smooth path – we lost a daughter to stillbirth, probably due to gestational diabetes. I conceived just a few weeks later and miscarried at 10 weeks. I have piriformis syndrome, which can be crippling in third trimester. We have gone through some dark and difficult times due to other sins in our lives – times in which we were sorely tempted to stop having children. We are unspeakably thankful that God blocked that path from us.

My intention was not to point fingers at those who disagree with us, but to encourage each of us to examine our decisions and convictions in light of Scripture rather than resting upon the standard lines of reasoning. Sometimes our own desires and fears can masquerade as convictions. We are all guilty of adopting the values of the society around us, but we are called to be different. We need to be ever mindful that we are held to God’s perfect and unchanging standard, and often that means conforming our own will to His.

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. Romans 12: 1-2

If you faint in the day of adversity,
Your strength is small. Proverbs 24:10

Memories

Vision Forum Deal of the Day: save 40-90%!

Posted by: Deanna

This is me when I was really small and stupid.

My Grandmother had told me not to eat the green tomatoes.

Did I listen? No.

I thought to myself, “The only reason Grandma would say that is if the green ones were the best ones, and therefore I am missing out on something if I don’t eat the little green ones.”

So for the second time that day I bit into that obviously delicious little green one-

and regretted it.

img005.jpg

Being Quiverfull

Vision Forum Deal of the Day: save 40-90%!

My friend MamaArcher started a QuiverFull Blogroll recently and would like members to post about their own Quiverfull Journey. My husband is going to post about the journey itself; I would like to ramble a bit about being here.

Let me start by saying that I understand that God gives some families fewer children. I am not talking about those who couldn’t have more children, but those who chose not to – for any reason.

Unlike many other large families, we have never received an overtly hostile comment, though many onlookers seem unsure what to think or say. We receive many of the same comments over and over. Some are simple observations:

  • Better you than me.
  • You sure have your hands full!

Fair enough. You never wanted a houseful of children. I won’t try to convince you that you’re wrong. My hands are full, though I firmly believe that even a single child will keep a mother’s hands full. 8 children really are not 8 times as much work. Children require our full attention whether we have 1 or a dozen.

Some comments are unqualified compliments:

  • They’re beautiful!
  • They’re so well behaved!
  • Are you Christians? I could just tell…

But many comments sound more like excuses:

  • I don’t know how you do it. My two kids keep me busy/drive me crazy.
  • I would love a large family, but I just can’t afford more children.
  • I’m just not patient enough.
  • I would have had more, but pregnancy was too hard on me. I just wasn’t made for it. (***Or my doctor advised me not to have any more.)

This may sound harsh, but I think all of these really are just excuses. I think that many people, for many reasons, just honestly don’t want large families and when they see a large family they instinctively feel a bit defensive. We obviously disagree with their choice in family size. Knowing or assuming this, they will seek and find the excuse they need to justify their decision.
But an excuse is not a legitimate reason. “I can’t, because…” doesn’t sound any better coming from an adult than from the child who doesn’t want to do what he’s told. If you see a large family and immediately feel the need to defend your choice not to have a large family, maybe you need to reconsider. Do you think we couldn’t use the same excuses?

If we believe that children are a blessing from God and that large families should be the norm, we need to act upon that belief regardless of whether we really think we’re ready for the job. No excuses. Who among us is really ready and fully equipped to raise even one child? Can any of us really expect to succeed in this monumental task by our own strength and virtue?

Can you guarantee that you are patient enough to raise even one child? Do you think I was equipped to be the mother of this crowd when I was a newlywed? Do you think I’m the perfect model of saintly patience now?

Do you really have the financial stability to commit to providing for a child for 18 or more years? How do you know where your job or bank account will stand at this time next year? Are you sure you’ll even be alive next week?

Do you think pregnancy is always fun or easy for moms of many? Our hips and backs hurt too. Labor hurts, every time. We have gestational diabetes, ligament pain, fatigue, anemia, c-sections, morning sickness, children with handicaps, stillbirths and miscarriages. We do this joyfully because it is our service to the Lord, not because it sounds like fun.

Why do we do this? It certainly sounds foolish to some people. They see a large family crowded into a small home, driving an old van, counting their spare change to decide if they really ought to order off the dollar menu or just buy a bunch of bananas, all for want of a few dollars’ worth of birth control.

This is foolishness to some. Some would say it’s also foolish to pay tithes when you can’t pay your bills, or to thank God for the food you raised by the sweat of your own brow, or to abstain from premarital sex. We think Scripture teaches differently, and we are not ashamed to appear foolish in the eyes of the world.

For the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.

***If your doctor advised you not to have more children, I understand that yours was a hard decision – but it was a decision nonetheless. You had a choice and you made it. Not everyone obeys their doctor’s advice; not every doctor offers the same advice, and not everyone who goes against the advice of a doctor winds up regretting it. I’m not saying that you should have decided differently. Only that you did, indeed, have and make a choice.

see the follow-up post here: Quiverfull Clarifications

Cash Crate

Vision Forum Deal of the Day: save 40-90%!

Does anyone know much about Cash Crate? I tried it out today and am still trying to make up my mind about it. My time was divided, as usual, but I estimate that I spent around 45 minutes earning $15. That seems like a good return on my time, and I think I could do better with a little practice.

Basically, it’s a site that collects various offers for surveys, mailing lists, credit cards, etc and pays you a portion of what they make when you sign up. Credit card offers and cash advance applications pay the best but I skipped those for obvious reasons.

I have tried doing surveys for $$ in the past but I rarely fit the desired demographic group and spent all my time looking for the right survey, making little or no money. However, Cash Crate makes it easy to find suitable offers and keeps a running total for you right at the top of the screen. Even though many of the offers I did were less than $1, it was encouraging to see how quickly they added up.

I use a separate email addy especially for junk mail so that all the offers I’m signing up for don’t drown my regular email, and we don’t mind junk mail in the old-fashioned mailbox. The postal carrier may feel differently; maybe I should apologize to her. :)

So tell me; have you ever tried Cash Crate? What did you think? Did you stick with it?

If you’ve never tried it and your curiosity is piqued, please consider using one of my links above.  You’ll add a bit to my earnings for the day and help confirm my tentatively positive opinion.

A banana epiphany

Vision Forum Deal of the Day: save 40-90%!

Our household has recently gone crazy over bananas, thanks in large to The Boy. That kid will eat 3 bananas before breakfast and 3 more over the course of the day – in addition to 3 hearty meals and a snack here and there. That boy can eat. We have begun to call him “Manna Man” before 9 or 10 AM, because all he does in the morning is ask for mannas.

Influenced by him, the rest of us have upped our banana consumption as well. I am guessing we eat 30 lbs per week, conservatively. I mean the guess is conservative; we eat them liberally.

All of this is leading up to my epiphany, though none of it was really necessary info. I just felt like sharing all that. Here is my grand realization. As I was standing at a gas station, munching on a banana while a bathtub worth of gasoline gushed into my gas tank, I realized that there are at least 3 wonderful characteristics of bananas that combine to make them uniquely convenient:

  1. They can be eaten unwashed, since you peel them.
  2. They can be eaten with unwashed hands, since you peel them and hold them by the peel.
  3. No need to wash afterward, since you hold them by the peel.

How many other healthy, all natural foods could you eat with no prep while pumping gas with no concern over contamination? Well, I guess you could worry about fumes, but I was going to breath regardless of whether I was cramming food in my mouth…

As an additional note of interest, can anyone tell me what common element of punctuation I did not use in this post? Here is why: my computer (or maybe it was a decision of WordPress) has decided to open a search every time I hit a particular key. Normally this happens when I hit Control+F, but tonight it happens when I try to use that particularly handy bit of punctuation. Bizarre? Yes. But I never claimed to live a normal life.

See? My life is never boring, and it is not always because of the children.

Total lunar eclipse

Vision Forum Deal of the Day: save 40-90%!

HT to Amazing Graze Farm for tipping us off about tomorrow’s total eclipse of the moon.  Read about it here, then go check your weather forecast.  We’re expecting a mostly cloudy evening, but we haven’t given up yet.  Maybe God wants us to to see this miracle of His, and maybe it’s not for us.  We’ll find out tomorrow.

Camping out at our house

Vision Forum Deal of the Day: save 40-90%!

Last night Kaitlyn, Lydia, and I slept out on our deck.

Not particularly brave or crazy in and of itself,

outside-pallet.JPG

except that it got down to 30 degrees last night.

The picture is of a certain lazy person who stayed in bed latest and in case you didn’t notice the pallet consists of a grand total of at least 14 blankets, and quilts. (3 comforters and 1 sleeping bag made the bottom layer, and the rest was 5 quilts, 2 throw blankets, and 3 fuzzy blankets.)

We wanted to sleep outside because the moon was shining brightly enough that you could have read by it (not that we did) and everything was silvery blue, so it was pretty exciting. As it turned out though the moonlight kept me awake for at least forty minutes after I would have been asleep in my bed.

Its always a bit of an adventure getting ready to sleep on the deck, for example:

1. You have to convince at least one other person to sleep outside with you because who wants to sleep out in the cold all alone, moonlight or not? Even if you freeze during the night you can have the comfort of knowing that the other person is just as miserable as you are. (unless of course the other person can’t hack it and deserts in which case you either stay outside and freeze alone to prove that the traitor is being a cotton headed ninnymuggins, or you follow inside and spend the rest of the night in your nice warm bed telling the traitor how much of a cotton headed ninnymuggins she/he is being.)

2. unless you have really thick, heavy duty sleeping bags then you will want to go through the whole house and gather the thickest and biggest blankets you can find. Even on humid summer nights you get cold without at least a comforter under and over you. Last night we swiped a comforter off two sleeping sisters and replaced it with quilts.

3. Next you lay out the pallet. We have learned through trial and error that what tends to work best is the comforters under you, and then one big blanket topped with all the smaller ones (throws, kid quilts, and fuzzy blankets.) on top of that with another large blanket on top to hold them down (the very top one should be the very heaviest one you have, especially if the night is windy. One night we had to go down and get rocks out of the yard to hold down the sides of the blankets because they kept blowing away while we slept.) Please believe me when I say this is the voice of experience speaking here.

4. Now you lie down and everyone takes a turn wriggling, and shifting, and complaining about how crowded they are, and how little blanket they have. This part can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 25 minutes.

5. Now that everyone’s settled in we all take turns jabbering, giggling, and yelling at everyone else to “shut up” because “we’re not out here to talk, and I’m trying to get some sleep!” at this point one or two people may or may not gather their pillow and blanket and go back inside complaining about how some people just don’t shut up. There may be a little bit of story telling if every one is restless. Although the stories don’t usually help get hyperactive people to sleep, it does shut the hyperactive people up so the tired people can get to sleep.

6. By this point whoever is still awake and can’t get to sleep either forces the hyperactive people inside or goes in herself leaving usually about 1 to 3 people on the deck to last the night snuggled up to stay warm. (Last night I kept thinking about the movie ELF when Will Ferrell says “…And then we’ll snuggle!” I momentarily considered starting a tickle fight but discarded the idea because some people have no sense of humor of which they are aware concerning tickling).

I usually doze off and on through the night and wake up cold. Last night though I put on a nice warm sweater, blue jeans, and thick fuzzy socks and I was extremely thankful for them before the night was over.

Sometimes we’ll sleep down on our trampoline but that’s a whole other story.

My first CVS/Walgreens outing

Vision Forum Deal of the Day: save 40-90%!

After months of managing the Frugal Blogroll and following Crystal’s Money Saving Moms, I finally decided to jump on the CVS/Walgreen’s Super Shopper bandwagon. I had heard enough of people spending fourteen cents on $76 worth of toiletries and getting another $45 in rebates. With 10 people in our house we could really use $76 worth of toiletries. Weekly.

Unfortunately, my first outing was less than glorious. First, my printer wasn’t cooperating. This took the wind out of my sails. Stacking sales, coupons and rebates doesn’t work as well if you can’t print out all the best coupons that everyone is hyperventilating over.

Then the car was dead. I was forced to drive the gas guzzling 15 passenger van. I told myself the savings would still be worth it, especially since I wasn’t making a special trip to town – I was going for a dental cleaning first.

My dental appointment didn’t go well. They smiled apologetically and told me I was doing a fantastic job keeping my teeth clean, but…and then they said things about fillings, cracks in my teeth, crowns, and the long term effects of amalgam fillings. I was not happy.

Then I arrived at CVS to learn that they were all out of the book of monthly deals. I don’t remember its real name and I didn’t remember why I needed it, but I suddenly felt lost and out of place with no coupons or Monthly Deal Book. To top it off, my CVS list was at home. I felt like a Typical Spender, not a Super Shopper. I applied for my Extra Care Card and meekly left, resolving to return armed with coupons and a list.

My next stop was going to be Super Target, but without coupons that just wasn’t going to happen.

On to Walgreens. I had clipped a few coupons from the weekly ad and I was jazzed about the Free After Rebate deals – even without printable coupons this would be a worthwhile stop. An hour later, I stood in line with my meager purchases. The clerk patiently helped me find the items I had missed and I left with 3 small bags of paper products and various toiletries, consoled that I had a luxurious $10 razor that would be free after rebate along with a few other choice items.

When I finally got home, I only found 2 Walgreens bags in my van. I looked again. I moved The Stuff That Stays In The Van and looked again. Two bags. No luxurious razor. No receipt for said razor. I called Walgreens and they knew nothing. “So, I guess I’m out of luck” I inquired lightheartedly. There was an awkward silence. “Well…I don’t know what to tell you, ma’am…” Right. That’s because people in customer service aren’t allowed to tell customers that yes, they are out of luck.

No wind in my sails again. I was worse than a Typical Spender. I spent money and came home with nothing.

Then my knight in shining armor went out to the van. Twenty seconds later, he strode cavalierly back into the house carrying my bag. My day is looking brighter. I can’t wait to file for my rebate and shave my legs. And I can’t wait to print some coupons for CVS. I just know it will be worth the trip!

Wedding dresses

Vision Forum Deal of the Day: save 40-90%!

nonna-wedding-dress.JPGmom-wedding2.jpg

Look, the picture on the right is Mom on her wedding day.

The one on the left is me fifteen years later wearing the same dress.

Lord willing, in a couple of years I’ll be wearing my own wedding dress and fifteen years after that, hopefully I’ll have at least eight kids.

Maybe I’ll even be looking back on today and smiling as my daughter excitedly tries on my old wedding dress, and maybe it will have been my mother’s before me…Who knows?

There’s a lot of potential in an old white dress isn’t there?

Pregnancy update

Vision Forum Deal of the Day: save 40-90%!

I love being pregnant.  In spite of the nausea, the aches, the creaking joints, the crazy blood sugar crashes, and all the accompanying discomforts, there is an undeniable wonder in carrying a child.  I am amazed at every kick, and I can hardly believe that we have a new child – one that we haven’t met or named yet, but nonetheless a complete little person, body and soul, riding about with me.

I am about 22 weeks into this pregnancy, with 18 left to go.  Just 2 weeks ago, I was looking thick around the middle but not distinctly pregnant.  At least, I think I was.  Many people said things like, “Are you just one of those people that doesn’t really show?” and “Wow!  You look great!”

At any rate, I suddenly look FAR MORE pregnant.  I am distinctly, obviously, undeniably pregnant now.  I look like I swallowed a basketball, or at least a really big, squishy volleyball.  Now clerks offer to help carry my groceries out to the car.  Now I get that sweet smile from strangers that says, “Oh, look.  How cute!”  Last week I walked into church and heard lots of “Wow!” comments again, but this time they were followed by “You’re really starting to show!”

I like this look.  I hear I’m very cute.  I may feel differently about it in 4 months, but for now I actually enjoy being “cute.”  I’m cherishing each new stage of this pregnancy.

I feel the baby move now frequently, daily.  Big kicks, small kicks, rhythmic kicks that feel like hiccups (do babies get hiccups this early?)  The baby is getting strong enough that movement can be seen by others now if I hold very still.

And I am still absolutely tickled that my due date lies right around The Boy’s birthday, which also happens to be my nephew’s birthday (born exactly 1 year before The Boy) and my mom’s birthday.  Would it be too much to hope to have a second son on the very same day?

Question: We have the book A Child Is Born.  I love the photos of baby’s development through every stage of pregnancy, but we don’t like all the maternal nudity.  Does anyone know of a more suitable book about fetal development with lots of ultrasound photos?