I feel a little weird...

...being this excited about something that catches poo.

But I AM! That's right friends, we are cloth diapering. For multiple reasons. I'll lay them out for you:

1. It saves LOTS of money. Even calculating the cost of water and electricity you use for all the extra cycles of wash, I calculated (using this fancy shmancy cloth diaper money saver calculator app. I did not do the math... ) that we would save upwards of $700 over the course of sweet little Elle's diapered life.

2. It's not that difficult! I've done my fair share of research and have talked to lots of close friends that do this and, sure, it will take a little extra effort to do a load of laundry. But our laundry doing is going to be up by like 200% anyway... why not throw in a load or two of diapers every week?

3. Did you even SEE how cute that diaper is?

4. In some small way we're lessening our carbon footprint on our world. We do live in Austin, after all.

This weekend has been full of things for Elle. The most exciting of which included a cloth diaper shower thrown by the wonderful Anneke Swanson. The girls in my missional community came together, bought Ellerbe Anne some much needed poo catchers and accessories (thanks ladies!), prayed over us, and made lots of cute onesies. It was so much fun. I'm really blessed to be a part of such a wonderful community that is learning to love one another as Jesus called us to.

The second most exciting thing was our birthing class. Tyler and I sat and attentively (most of the time) listened to all the wonderful and gory details of labor and delivery. There were multiple times that both or one of us were crying. Out of sheer joyful anticipation for that day. Oh, friends, we cannot wait! We're so excited to meet this little river dancer. It's going to be a wonderful, wonderful day. I'm not nervous about the whole "giving birth" part, just yet. I know it won't be comfortable, although I'm hoping to have something to help with that, Lord willing. But it's one of the most hopeful kinds of pain I'll ever experience. No matter how ridiculous everything gets, there will be a sweet little crying, pooping, love nugget at the end of it all. I kind of feel like I can handle anything if that's the end result. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but those are my current sentiments on the subject.

The THIRD most exciting part was having dinner with the Dansby's. They have 2 sweet kids (Noah and Annalise) and they are loaning Elle LOTS of really cute baby clothes. I mean, my child is going to be VERY well outfitted. Here's one of the cute little numbers that we inherited for a few months from Annalise:

You'll just have to excuse the awful lighting. But you can clearly tell that it's capital A-Adorable.

Pretty cool that God is providing in such practical ways for our little family.

Also... today I'm 31 weeks. That's a big deal. Because that means that in only 9 weeks we could be meeting our baby girl. Those are single digit weeks, friends. My mind's reeling a little bit.

Here's the 31 week belly:

Wow, it looks a lot bigger on that picture than I feel like it looks in real life??

One day, I'll take one with my REAL camera and put it on here... but for now, computer pictures are just a lot easier. and also, maybe one day I'll write about something other than Elle, but right now I don't think about much else. :)

Happy Sunday!