THOUGHTS

A revision of posts from 2013 & 2014

Happy Father's Day tomorrow!

A little boy came home from school with a side ache and said, "I guess I'm having a wife."  

Yep, that's how it all starts.

When I finished my college degree with highest honors for all my hard work, I received a piece of paper on cardboard and a tassel to switch on a silly flat hat while wearing a robe.  Though I had worked hard, very hard, the real world was harder: get a job.  Then came the hardest of all, parenthood.  Though I had spent years babysitting, and though we had taken a college course together called Marriage and Family, read all I could from "Mother Earth," and had even seen a movie showing a baby being born, no one had ever mentioned colic.  Entering the unknown world of a colicky baby was very scary indeed!  

One English visitor who dropped by unannounced leaned over the crib of our crying baby said, "Just a bit windy.  Boil an onion and give it to him."  We tried everything, except the onion juice, and nothing worked.

I wouldn't wish anyone to "sleep like a baby" because around our house sleep went out the back door when the baby came in the front arriving home from the hospital.  I tenderly cared for my babies nursing, rocking and singing lullabies while they turned up their volume with their screams.  They were very dear to us, but they did not seem quite so enamored with their parents if judging by the amount of crying they did.  Colic didn't last a few weeks, but months, years.  One daughter slept through the night finally at the age of six.  We tried everything, even letting them cry.  After hours of crying, myself included,  this daughter at ten months old  climbed out of the crib and fell on her head.  After three colicky babies, even my husband had his "daddy walk" down jiggling and bouncing them encouraging and imploring them to sleep.   

The apostle Paul must not have been kept up all night at his host's house with a colicky baby, for he turned a little nostalgic on us after he probably observed a nursing mother tenderly caring for her babe.  He wrote this to his spiritual children:

"...we proved to be gentle among you, as a nursing mother tenderly cares for her own children.  Having thus a fond affection for you, we were well-pleased to impart to you, not only the gospel of God but also our own lives, because you had become very dear to us.  For you recall, brethren, our labor and hardship, how working night and day as not to be a burden to any of you, we proclaimed to your the Gospel of God...encouraging and imploring each one of you as a father would his own children."  I Thessalonians 2:7-9, 11.

My granddaughter Grace at six once sang a made-up song, "What will I do with eighteen kids?"  It goes on and on until now she is up to twenty-nine kids.  The verse says, "Now my only friends are parents."  Then she continues, "I can't have more than thirty kids because I have to live with them.  She also informed me that kindergarten is really a garden of kids.  

Take heart, sleep-walking dead, those of you whose children have stolen your sleep.

Your garden of kids are worth it!