Our sweet friends are having a baby today! They are at the hospital right now, only a couple hours away from meeting her! I’m ecstatic. Seriously. I’m super blessed to have a friend who’s husband is friends with my husband. Our kids play together, and we have gone through two pregnancies and countless parenting things together. We love them like family, and I cannot wait to meet their daughter!
When we were pregnant with Phoebe, they were five months ahead of us with their son. So when we met their sweet boy, we were finding out we were going to have a girl. So our babies are almost exactly five months apart. These babies will be five days apart. They had a boy we had a girl. Now we are having a boy and they are having a girl. There is something so sweet about that. It’s like we will both have one of each, but we will get to watch the other and remember when our firsts were fresh little newborns.
I love babies. I seriously just adore them. Ryan says I have a baby face, not that I have a baby face, but I make this certain face when I see a baby. Pure love. Because to me that is absolutely what a baby is. I mean they come with a lot of challenge, and poop. So much poop… and that I cannot love. Poop is gross, no matter what, but babies. Oh babies.
The innocence is just so pure and sweet and new. They don’t manipulate you. They don’t know what pain is… not really. Their little hearts are all in one piece. They also make us selfless in a way that most other things in life cannot. Babies cannot thank you or love you out loud. They can’t kiss you or hug you, but you still have to thanklessly care for them. They do something crazy to your soul. Because don’t we all feel like when we do something for someone we deserve appreciation for it? I’m not saying that we always do things for gratification, but most of us need that a little bit. Babies can’t deliver, and that means we just have to do it because we love them and we want them and we want them to be happy.
They are also a complete mystery at first. At least Phoebe was to me. At this stage I can usually tell you exactly what she wants. I know what her hungry looks like and when she says she is hungry, I know that sometimes she is actually thirsty. I know when she wants to sleep and when even though it’s bedtime, if I lay her down right now there is no way it’s going to happen, so we stay up and play a little longer so she will go to sleep without a fight.
When she was a baby? I had NO earthly idea 98% of the time. People tell you that you’ll just know, maybe I will get that this time, but I had no freaking clue what the heck her cries meant. Hungry cry. Sad cry. Tired cry. Colic cry. Angry cry. Changemydiaperyouidiot cry. All sounded exactly the same to me. She also had colic, so there was a lot of crying. Screaming. So yeah, she was a mystery to me. Which now I remember as something sort of poetic and sweet, but at the time it was total hell. Because you just feel so HELPLESS. Seriously… baby books don’t do anything for those moments. You just want to know what the this tiny human that you love wants, and you just don’t know. So you guess until the crying stops. You do every single thing on the list. You turn on a hair dryer for hours because you haven’t discovered simplynoise.com yet (GodSEND!). You stand for and do the five s’s for HOURS because nothing else works. You cry with her because… what else is there to do?
Still… they are just tiny little people counting on you for every need, and that I love. I just think it’s a beautiful picture and example. If we could all be just that dependent on God. If we just cried for him in our need. Oh my goodness how good it would be. Loving my husband and loving my babies have been the two things that have shaped my faith the most. I cannot fathom letting someone that I love so fiercely die for anyone else… let alone people who are completely crazy, broken, and terrible. Especially if they will continue to be crazy, broken, and terrible. Still he let it happen and Jesus did it… because this crazy thing called grace… we need it. He thought it was worth it to go through something that horrendous… so that we don’t have to. Loving my husband and loving my babies have also been the things that have made me most thankful for that sacrifice.
Here is the truth that is so hard for me to swallow. We all deserve the cross. I think it’s pretty easy for us to handle that truth for murderers, people who abuse children, people who shoot people in movie theaters, or fly planes into buildings. The hard part is that you and I… deserve it equally as much. The harder part for me, is that so does my husband and eventually my babies will too. Because that sweet baby innocence won’t last forever. Someday Phoebe will be sinful and selfish. Someday our baby boy won’t be an innocent baby in my womb, he will be a flawed and guilty man. That is our human nature. We all deserve the cross. My babies will deserve something that horrible, just like murderers and terrorists, and because of that… I am inexplicably thankful for the cross. Because of that horrible day when Jesus died, and the veil was torn, and the holy spirit came to live with us in our souls, they have a choice to accept and love the Lord and live eternally… and that makes mothering harder and sweeter. What a weight on our shoulders as parents… it’s the biggest responsibility. We have to lead them in a way that will bring them to Jesus daily, to teach them not to depend on us, but on Jesus, because we will fail them but he never will. We have to surrender control and love them and not hold on too tightly… because they are only ours for a season. Really… they aren’t ours at all. Just entrusted to us for this time, and oh gosh that’s hard.
I’m going to wrap this up for now, and just say that I’m so thankful for the sweet age of innocence we get with our babies. I have a feeling it will be helpful in about thirteen years when they hate me for making them fold their underwears and don’t let them date until they are 25.
