"From wonder into wonder, existence opens." - Lao Tzu

Life is a road map.

It's a big broad picture with shapes and lines and colors. Sometimes it has a key to decipher it, sometimes you're on your own. Whatever happens, you find yourself travelling down a road. It might be a many-laned freeway with frequent travellers all headed in the same direction. Maybe you end up on a dusty, bumpy, country lane with no signs and not an intersection in sight. Sometimes your sense of direction carries you to the destination you had in mind. Other times you feel lost amidst a myriad of intersections in a busy city. You can make frequent stops at the greenspace labeled, 'park', or many passes along the lakeshore to admire the view. Days can go by sitting in rush hour traffic in the smog with cranky drivers honking horns and flipping you off. Half the time there you struggle to get off on the exit you want. Better days might be driving through town to clearly marked stops. You can pause at the stoplights and watch the people and life pass by. The speed doesn't seem so rushed and hurried. I think some people choose to drive the same routes over and over; it's comfortable, familiar, predictable. Others like a little variety - a new scene, and choose new roads, often wondering where they'll lead. It's a little risky sometimes - you might get lost - but there's that chance that you'll discover something new and exciting along the way. Even though you might miss out on something new, there's something to be said of driving down the road you've been on a million times, those days with a sunny sky, the windows rolled down, and old music on the radio.

Funny thing . . . you're rarely the only one out there on the road. There are a lot of different road maps, but it's amazing how much they overlap and where they intersect. The other drivers on the road can make a big difference in how you experience the drive. Sometimes it's as if you're all pushing the speed limit in a pack on a long road trip, other times it's just the slow truck on a one-lane highway that forces you to slow down when you can't pass. It seems we all initially pull out the road map, figure out where we want to go, and head on down the road. But where we truly end up or where we spend our journey is anyone's guess. We pass each other and often leapfrog our stops. One road leads to another and the course becomes ever-changing.

I'm fascinated by maps. There's no concrete beginning or end to any trip, but I'm always up for the ride. It's amazing what you see when you look out the window and make frequent stops.

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Here's a profile of the little face growing inside of me - early photos for the family album. This was taken the third or fourth week of June. I'll have another ultrasound at the end of July to check and see how the baby's doing. We don't know yet if it's a boy or a girl, but already have names picked out for either. Hopefully we'll be able to find out in a few weeks if we're adding a fourth girl to our collection . . . or if it's a boy and we'll need to get a new rule book.