Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Happy 1st Birthday, Harpie Girl

Warning: This post and birthday related posts that are sure to follow may contain high and even dangerous levels of maternal sappiness.  Please view at your own risk. 

My baby is one.  One.  A whole year.  While there are millions of firsts left to be had, the year of firsts has come to a close.  Now when people ask how old my kids are, I will say "one and two" (actually 2 1/2- shout out to Gavin on his 1/2 birthday!) rather than "9 months and.." or "4 months and.." or something that has something to do with months...not years.  I intentionally tried not to blink since April 24th, 2012, but some how this crazy thing of time passing by and babies growing up has happened.  I am so proud of my baby girl.  She is a sweet little ragamuffin girl.  I love her dimple and her silliness and how she gasps for air when she thinks something is funny and how friendly she is and how she hollers at her brother when he gets up in her business and how she crawls like a little howler monkey and the little gap in her two front teeth and how when she doesn't have a bow in her hair, her hair looks like a little mushroom hat over her sweet little petite face.  I pretty much love all things that are Harper Addison.  

I started thinking the other night as I was holding her and rocking with her at bedtime- these are the most precious moments.  These are the most fleeting and precious moments- when your babies are tiny, when you can hold them in your arms and exchange slobber and snot and sweetness.  I look forward to countless moments as both my children grow up...and I want them to- I don't want to hold them back from growing up just because I'm a sappy mom.  BUT when I look back in my life at some of the most precious moments where I could ask God for time to stand still, I know that these will be some of them.  So with that in mind...I'd like to wish my little sunshine girl a happy first birthday and sing (er...type) her a birthday song. 

Someday, when I'm awfully low

When the world is cold


I will feel a glow just thinking of you

Just the way you look tonight

Oh but you're lovely

With your smile so warm

And your cheek so soft

There is nothing for me but to love you

Just the way you look tonight.

With each smile your tenderness grows

Tearing my fear apart

And that laugh that wrinkles your nose,

It touches my foolish heart. 
Oh, but you're lovely,

Never, ever change.

Keep that breathless charm.

Won't you please arrange it ?

Cause I love you,


just the way you look tonight.


Happy 1st Birthday, Harpie Girl.  You've made your mommy and daddy and brother so happy.  May your life continue to grow deep into Christ and your life continue to be built on Him.  We love you so so much. 

Friday, April 12, 2013

My children do NOT belong to the collective


I Corinthians 6:19-20 "You are not your own.  You were bought with a price.  Therefore glorify God in your body and your spirit, which are God's."

I think I may be on social media overload. Okay, not maybe. Probably. But none the less, a few things have my stomach churning. So many issues today that aren’t just political but apply to the moral fiber of our being. My mind can’t even go there this second. My heart breaks knowing the things that my children will be exposed to. I only pray that God will break their hearts for what breaks His.

What I AM going to go there on is a statement made recently by a host for MSNBC, Melissa Harris-Perry. Her exact quote was:

"We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we've always had kind of a private notion of children. Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven't had a very collective notion of these are our children, so part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities.”

This absolutely repulses me. In a society that has taken away any sense of personal responsibility for any action, decision, condition, etc. I guess this is just the next thing to go.  (I read another article this week with the basic jist "why is addiction still considered a weakness?"  The author was surprised that people "still" equate addiction with poor choices rather than a clinical or genetic disorder.  How defeatest can we possibly be?)  But our children?  So basically, my children were born to be raised by society for the responsibility and greater good of the "community"?  And what is the greater good of the community?  What purpose does "the community" have for my children?  I cannot even fathom the evils that would prevail if my children truly were belonging to the "community".  I'm glad that so many people were outraged, and the question was even asked facetiously "who would gladly hand over their parenting responsibilities."  I won't answer that since it's way more political than the point I'm trying to make is, but a great number of people gladly will and do in an entitlement society.


The truth is and the whole point of this post is that my children don’t even belong to me. Or my husband. Or our family. Gavin and Harper belong to God. They were only entrusted to Matthew and I for a season to shape and to mold for HIS purpose and glory. I claim in faith that my children were "bought with a price" and intended for His good works.  Similar to Hannah's prayer in I Samuel 1:11- totally paraphrased- "if you will give us a child, we will give him to the Lord all the days of his life."  That is the RESPONSIBILITY that my husband and I accepted when we were blessed with children and while we may not always or even often get it all right, that's our daily goal: to raise children who will love and serve God with all of their hearts and choose to obey Him.

Do I think this means my kids are going to be perfect?  Nope. Does it mean that we're going to be this awesome family that always gets it right, never has a fight or a behavior issue or problem?  Not a chance.  It's actually kind of hard.  Sometimes I have to remind myself that God might not chose for Gavin and Harper to be the next super successful dr or lawyer or the next worship leader or the next amazingly awesome drummer for his (or her!) generations' biggest Christian rock band (who can say we can't dream a little though, right?!).  God might have plans for Gavin and Harper that aren't what we would have in mind. And while that's hard to think about and even to type, I believe that God being glorified in their lives is far greater than happiness or success or for my dreams for them to come true could ever be.

I pray that we are doing enough to raise up a generation of Godly boys and girls who will some day be the men and women who take ownership for their faith and their choices and their standards and will not float around in the winds of surrender to culture.  I pray that when we look at our children, we would see an responsibility which is far greater than education or society could command.  My children belong to Christ. 

Friday, April 5, 2013

11 Months- March

This time last year I remember feeling like it was a countdown to baby time.  Spring was springing it seemed like everyone I knew on Facebook was having their babies, I was bigger than a boat and I couldn't wait to meet this little girl that had been growing inside of me for the past 8 months.  This year I feel like it's the countdown to 1!  I can't believe how fast the time has flown!  Harper is now one month away from her first birthday (yes, technically she is 19 days away from that, but for the purposes of an 11 month post, it is one month away.  I will also disclaimer that all developmental milestones reported were actually accomplished before March 24th, so while I admit to tardiness, my 11 month content will be factual and accurate).

This month Harper is a woman on the go.  She is a super fast crawler and loves walking around as long as she has something to hold onto.  

We have pulled back out Gavin's old shopping cart and Harper's a big fan.  She actually first was pulling up and walking with this little flimsy lawn mower toy that we have.  It's definitely doesn't have the same support that the shopping cart has, so she can move without leaning on a ton of stuff, but she still isn't quite ready to stand or walk on her own.  Give the girl some time.  

On occasion I have heard kids compared to puppies.  While I generally don't prefer the comparison, I can see where it's completely appropriate at our house this month.  Harper has developed a new love for playing in the toilet.  Couple this with the fact that we are trying to potty train Gavin, which means that we leave the toilet seat up a great deal of the time for convenience sake and you have a very messy little girl situation.  Gross.  I'll also insert a little Gavin story here (sorry, Harpie) we are, in fact, trying to potty train and he observed his super cool nephews  pottying in the grass when they came over to play one morning, so of course, he's a fan of that.  When we ask him if he has to potty now, chances are 50/50 that he'll actually ask to go "pee in da grass".  So when he asks for this, we let him go out the back door and...pee in da grass.  Another reason why I feel like I have a puppy instead of a child at times.
 
 And here is what Harper thinks about having a Gavin story inserted in the middle of HER 11-month-old blog post.

Back to Harper: Did I mention that Harper likes to move a lot?  All of these were snapped in about a 30 second time frame..and this was only a hand full of the ones we had to choose from.  




Holy rusted metal, batman.  She's a squirmy little independent missy.  This month she's eating more and more.  We've started giving her just about everything that we eat, just in teeny tiny bites.  She LOVES when Gavin feeds her. She is also a big fan of big kid sippy cups.  I'm not sure what it is about kids and sippy cups, but I think it's a universal rule that all kids what some other kids' sippy cup.  I definitely don't think we'll have a hard time transitioning her from a bottle. 

Harper and Matthew have started a sweet little father/daughter bedtime routine.  She usually gets a little wound up right before bedtime and you can tell that it's time for her to go to bed.  We've never been big on rocking our kids to sleep because we didn't want them to be dependent on that, but lately Matthew will feed her her bottle in her rocking chair and then rock her to sleep while he's cuddling with her.  It's so sweet and a  great little father/daughter bonding time with a daddy whose sadly had a little less time with Harper in her first year than he did with Gavin.  Our kids have a really good daddy.
 
Harper has been babbling a lot more.  She has added "mama" to her list of babbles, but I'll be realistic and know that she's not just directing it at me.  She calls just about anything "mama" and very sternly says it to books, cups, baby dolls, other friends and me.  It's okay- same with "dada", right?!

So our monthly snap shots are about to be a thing of the past.  It seems crazy since it felt like we went straight from doing these for Gavin (see Gavin's first year!) to doing them for Harpie.  She's definitely fearfully and wonderfully made and I've loved getting to know her in these first 11 months.  I can't wait for the lifetime ahead that we have with her to watch her grow more words and more movement and more personality and more laughter and more sassyness and and more smiles and more trouble and more sweetness.  She is sunshine to our lives and I'm so happy God surprised us with her.  
Until next month...