Letters From Me, To You: Babies don't keep... or something like that

Hey.

I thought once I started staying home I'd have more availability for writing. HA. Turns out, it's much easier to write when you're sitting in front of a computer all day, five days a week than when you're at home with a mobile baby and housework that needs to get done.

While I love writing, I'm finding myself using my dwindling free time to work out and stretch my sketching muscles instead. Maybe because my writing muscles take more brain power.

Anyway, a year ago I was feeling reeeeally pregnant and like every other pregnant woman I knew was having their baby. (Also, while I was 95% certain I was going to have a boy, something like 12 out of 13 of the ladies who had babies in the few months before us had girls. Silly me- felt like they were taking all the girl genes. Haha.)

Well, now they are all celebrating, or preparing to celebrate first birthdays. And I'm kind of dreading getting to that point. I saw a chart once that listed the different stages of childhood. Newborn, infant, toddler, child, preteen, teen, young adult, adult. The newborn stage was only the first month. I felt that. If I'm honest, it was a bit of a shock to mourn the end of it. Evelyn was such a content baby that it was amazingly easy to love that stage.

Now I'm staring down the end of the infant stage. Of course she'll always be our baby, but she won't be a baby anymore. She'll be a toddler. Why??? Why do we only get a baby for a year? It just doesn't seem long enough.

One of my friends who celebrated that first birthday recently, posted about how even though her daughter was celebrated, she felt the biggest change in herself, in what God had taught her about love during that year. I read that and thought, "YES. Yes, yes, YES!"

[Evie's dedication day]

I suppose it's only natural that this lesson of God's love should pop up more and more frequently as we approach June.

The sermon on Sunday was about Abraham trusting God when God told him to sacrifice his son, Isaac. The son that God had promised to Abraham and Sarah. The son that would lead to Abraham's descendants being as numerous as the stars.

This landed in my notes: "The same God that loved Abraham enough to stay his hand, to stop him from sacrificing his only son loved us enough not to stay the Romans' hands when they killed His only son."

Wow. I can not imagine.

We were also asked the question, "If everything you love were taken away from you, would God still be enough?"

Oh my.

I don't even have the words. I'll try. Are you ever afraid to tell God that He is enough? Like, if you tell Him that, maybe He will test your faith to see if that's true? You know, kind of like when you pray for patience and then you get majorly tested? Maybe I'm being silly, but it kind of freaks me out to think about it.

I wish I could wrap this up with a pretty bow and tell you I figured it out and that I'm exactly on the right page with God. That would be a lie. It still makes me sick to my stomach to think about it. I guess it comes down to me getting to know Him more. I suppose I have the rest of my life to get there.

In the meantime, I will be soaking up the last couple months of my baby being a baby... who happens to be teething and miserable again. We're really hoping it lasts just a few days like last time.

As far as celebrating goes, I've always felt like Jered and I are the ones who need the first birthday party. We did it, right? She just ate, pooped, slept, and played. We did all the work. Ha. I'm sure we'll cave and do a little something for the little one. How could we say no to that face?

[Monkey lips... one of the many adorable tricks she's picked up recently]

I've also been aching for some time to sit and be nostalgic. I want to go through all the photos and videos we've taken since the beginning. I want to sit and journal about every little detail I can remember because I was terrible at doing it as it happened. (This is one of the perks of social media though, right? Instagram has been like a mini-journal for me.) I want to work on a baby book! Nothing like procrastinating and trying to do it all at once, am I right?