Deuteronomy 6:6-9

I am already starting to see how quickly babies grow. Leah still doesn't do much more than eat, sleep, and poop, but she is starting to be awake a lot more often. She's smiling for real now, in recognition to people's voices, and it always makes me smile! This milestone has got me forward-thinking to the next milestones, like sitting up and laughing and eventually crawling. Trust me, I am in no hurry for her to get there, but it made me really think about her future and all that we have to look forward to. It also made me think how relatively easy the decisions Brett & I have had to make in raising Leah have been so far, and how much harder they are bound to get as she gets older. Right now it is so easy to focus on the day to day-- making sure she is fed and clean and well-rested. It seems hard now. But I can imagine it will be a different kind of challenge as she grows.



Before we know it, we will be faced with the responsibility of sharing the Gospel with our daughter. Sure, that's really an everyday responsibility that we will live out in our daily lives, but there will come a day when she will have questions, and we will be her primary source of information. We will be the ones that will model Christ to her. And then before we know it, we will be making decisions that are so much harder than whether we should wake her to feed her or let her sleep during the day, or whether we should bottle or breastfeed. We will be helping her make decisions about the friends she should spend time with, the activities she should participate in, whether she should date. We will be the ones that will model honesty and purity and humility in relationships.


I can barely fathom the idea of Leah as a teenager, and then as an adult, making her own decisions and becoming the person God is already shaping her to be. But I know it will happen before we know it, and what an awesome responsibility Brett & I have as her parents to model all that is pure and True!






Look who's smiling now!








If you have time, watch this video of Steven Curtis Chapman's song, Cinderella. I'd heard it before, but it is so much more meaningful now that I have a little girl of my own. Be prepared to cry!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfxL0S-7yVo