Day 13: Personal Entry - Open Hands

The other day, I heard someone use the phrase, 'I love with open hands' and it has stuck with me. I can't remember where I heard it or the context it was used in but it made me think of how I want to love my kid(s).

So much of me wants to hold on tight with white knuckles and keep her safe from every possible germ, danger and difficult challenge. But of course, if I did this she'd never learn and grow and experience what she needs in order to be a fully functioning adult.

Beyond the need to let go in order for her to grow, there is my need to let go in order to trust God. Our Father of good gifts loves our precious babes more than we do. They are really His. We are blessed with the time we have with them and blessed with the challenge to raise them. But they are still His.

When I was pregnant and praying for our sweet girl, I prayed that God would keep my heart in check on this. I knew that once I saw her little face, it would be harder and harder to trust the Lord with the timing of her life. And it has been true. The longer I know and love Emerson, the harder it is to think that if something were to happen to her, I still need to trust that the Lord is greater. His plan is greater and His will is greater. And that He is good.

Moments before Emerson was born and it was clear that she needed to be born a minute ago, I began praying that God's will would be done. I trusted Him. After she was out and during that long minute while we waited for her to take a breath, I still prayed that God's will would be done. I've said before that in my heart there was peace and not fear. In my head, however, I was thinking that surely God wouldn't bring us through 40 weeks of pregnancy only to lose her before she started breathing. Surely God wouldn't ask that of us. Yet, I knew full well that we weren't exempt from heartache or pain. God might have asked that of us and we would struggle through accepting His good and perfect will, even if it included the unbearable. Somehow he would use it for His good. Somehow we would endure. Somehow we would be better for it. And I had peace in that. Thankfully, His will was the beautiful life we are enjoying today.

I remember having similar thoughts as I waited for the weeks to pass until we were out of the miscarriage risk window. Maybe this seems morbid, or maybe it seems pessimistic but I just wanted to go into this journey with the reality in mind that our kids are not our own possessions, but a gift from God. A treasure to protect with our lives and then some.

Again, the longer I love our baby girl the harder it is to remember that she is not solely ours, nor is it our sole responsibility to keep her safe. This is a partnership with our Creator and it is only through a trusting relationship with Him that we can really do our best for her. It makes my insides flip-flop to think of something happening to her. It makes my heart drop to my toes when I think about trusting the Lord like Abraham did with Issac. Or when I think of the tragedies in history that involved children, like the gas showers in the Nazi death camps or the third class passengers in the Titanic. How did those mothers (and fathers) endure that torture. These thoughts make me curl my toes and begin plans for a safety bubble. But of course there is no bubble big enough. We can't really do anything, except turn it over to the Lord and trust His perfect will. Prayerfully lifting our child(ren) up to Him, petitioning Him for wisdom, safety, protection, and the faith to trust Him through whatever life brings us.

Open hands. Trusting heart.

One Week

We started my 40th week of pregnancy with some light contractions that I didn't think would lead to anything. We took the 40 weeks picture thinking I'd be writing the post to go with it by the end of the week. However, Pumpkin had other plans. Our sweet Emerson Jane joined us the next morning.

Our first week was both magical and a little rough. It was a little like a vacation in that it wasn't reality, no work schedule... no schedule at all, nothing to do but just soak up our new little blessing and learn our way around being parents.

The magical part was of course our sweet Emerson and our new roles as parents. I loved seeing Blake as a daddy and how great he is with Emerson. He was such an incredible support through all that our first week threw at us. We loved having the week with just the three of us (as hard as that was sometimes) to get to know Emerson and to work together to meet her needs.

The rough part was with nursing, jaundice and strep. Emerson had jaundice within her first twenty-four hours, which is a warning sign for pathological jaundice instead of the typical jaundice that many newborns get. We had to keep our eye on it, but as long as she was nursing well we should have been fine. Well, my milk came in on day two and then we had the Day of Tears. My poor little girl couldn't latch onto the bowling balls of milk and we didn't know how to help her. It totally rocked our world and turned it upside down. She cried, I cried and Blake cried. All. Day. Long. We saw a fantastic lactation consultant who came to our home that night and helped a ton. By the next feeding we were making headway and she's been doing better and better each time since. However, because of the Day of Tears, we were worried about her being dehydrated and her bilirubin levels not going down. Our midwife/doctor had us give Emerson activated charcoal through a syringe during her feeds in order to absorb the bilirubin and help her pass it quicker. This solution worked and eventually we noticed her yellow going down.

On top of this drama with nursing and jaundice... Blake got strep. He had a fever and a sore throat, which we had attributed to lack of sleep, lack of eating and lots of adrenaline. His fever didn't come back after a good nights' sleep but his throat was still sore. One day the white spots showed up and we called our midwife/doctor and she called in a prescription for some antibiotics and said we didn't want to mess around with strep when we had a new baby in the house. Having a sick husband and a new baby and a sore momma made for an interesting week. However, it was a total bonding experience and despite being sick, Blake was an incredible support through everything.

So we survived our first week! At our one week visit little miss Emerson had gained 6.5 ounces! Her jaundice was reducing nicely and she is feeding and sleeping well. Blake is feeling better and I'm recovering. Here are some moments from our first week.

She's always making the greatest facial expressions and doing funny things with her hands.

We had our first sponge bath

All clean!

Grandma Val came to visit.

And Grandma Janet came back to help out for the week. 

She has about 8000 pictures taken of her sleeping

"Oh mom, again with the pictures!?"

We also had our newborn photoshoot! Can't wait to see the rest of these pictures!

The Power (and Peril) of Praise

This article was just too good not to share. I'll warn you, it's long (five web pages). I'll also summarize for you, but would encourage you to read it for yourself too. I liked how they didn't just reference a study and leave it at that, they really followed through and wrapped up the topic.

How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids -- New York Magazine

The article starts out looking at the difference between praising a student's intelligence and praising their effort. The first study they reference discovered that students praised for their intelligence often gave up on or avoided new challenges and did quite poorly when given a challenge. The students that were praised for their effort took on new challenges and tried harder - usually doing better.

“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” Dweck [the researcher] explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.” In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

The article goes on to discuss praise as it relates to self-esteem, and the effects of the 'self-esteem movement' which espouses that "praise, self-esteem, and performance rise and fall together" (you know, the 'everyone gets a trophy' movement). 

After reviewing those 200 studies, Baumeister concluded that having high self-esteem didn’t improve grades or career achievement. It didn’t even reduce alcohol usage. And it especially did not lower violence of any sort. (Highly aggressive, violent people happen to think very highly of themselves, debunking the theory that people are aggressive to make up for low self-esteem.) At the time, Baumeister was quoted as saying that his findings were “the biggest disappointment of my career.”
Now he’s on Dweck’s side of the argument, and his work is going in a similar direction: He will soon publish an article showing that for college students on the verge of failing in class, esteem-building praise causes their grades to sink further. Baumeister has come to believe the continued appeal of self-esteem is largely tied to parents’ pride in their children’s achievements: It’s so strong that “when they praise their kids, it’s not that far from praising themselves."

The article brings it back home with a discussion about how we should praise and reward our kids. It ties back into the initial suggestion that praising the effort or the process is more effective and productive than praising the outcome or their intelligence. By praising kids differently, or rather by praising them specifically, we can help them build their cognitive and problem solving skills and teach them that persistence does pay off. There's reward in trying and not just in winning.

Cloninger has trained rats and mice in mazes to have persistence by carefully not rewarding them when they get to the finish. “The key is intermittent reinforcement,” says Cloninger. The brain has to learn that frustrating spells can be worked through. “A person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because they’ll quit when the rewards disappear.”

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This rings true with what I know from being a speech therapist. Have you ever seen a completely prompt-dependent kid? They don't even think about what they're doing/saying, they just watch your face for cues of praise and land on the closest thing once they see it. We've taught them not to think but to look for the reward (but that is fairly rare, thankfully). I've also noticed this when assessing students and the difference between the effort put out when you tell a kid, "I like how hard you are trying" or "I like how you looked at all the pictures" vs just saying, "you're so smart, you're doing great". I'm reminded of neurological studies of dementia patients that show that even in a state of deterioration, the brain can still learn new things. Regardless of our innate intelligence capacity, our brains are amazingly designed to keep learning.

This also strikes a tone with my personal values. I've never bought into the idea that giving everyone a trophy was going to make the world a better place. I don't really think that making everyone feel good produces better work ethics, and I think that learning from our clearly defined mistakes is a valuable part of life, academic and personal. I'm also a believer that positive self-esteem is a mask for empty pride and that we shouldn't 'believe in ourselves' as much as we believe in God (Proverbs 3:5 comes to mind).

I know there is balance in all things, and we can't walk around living like doormats. However, my value isn't found in my opinion of myself but is found in God's opinion of me - and although humbling, it is also pretty encouraging. He unconditionally loves me even though I don't deserve it, and walking around with that in your head will get you farther than believing in yourself. Knowing that God finds value in you gives you a purpose and success is found not in achievements but in dependence on and reflection of Him. This is really the kind of praise I want my kids to get: praise that builds their character, teaches them to put others first and to live by a higher standard than one they or the world sets. Praise that teaches them to persist in all that life brings (academic or otherwise) and in faith and to trust in their Creator.

Anyway, very interesting and worth the read!

"When are you guys going to have kids!?"

This is the story of my journey toward motherhood (we're not there yet):
We get asked this question a lot. I really don't mind, it's to be expected at this stage in our lives. My mom doesn't ask because she knows that I have gone through many phases of wanting or not wanting kids and the reasons for those phases. I also think that she trusts us to make the decision when we're ready and just doesn't feel the need to meddle. Sometimes my answer to this question is: "Maybe never."

The truth is, we did go through a phase where we seriously questioned if we should have kids instead of how many and when. We both agreed that we wanted kids when we were dating, but certainly not anytime soon. After we got married, we thought it was pretty great to have our time all to each other and we were impressed with what life with two incomes might offer. We selfishly thought that maybe this DINK (Double Income, No Kids) lifestyle would be better than all that stress and cost of raising kids in this society. At first the motivation was really just selfish. I had just finished working in the schools and was working with pediatrics right after our honeymoon, so this seemed like a nice way to satisfy my love for kids... enjoy them at work but don't bring them home.

After several months of marriage I started working in geriatrics again. Maybe it was God's hand but I had several patients in a row that never had children. It was uncanny that patient after patient was unable to have children and either adopted, took care of nieces and nephews or just lived without dependents. I realized the longevity of the decision we would make at such a young age. It's not something you can really change your mind about after a certain point. I also realized how hard it was for these elderly couples that didn't have kids or grand kids to help them make decisions or care for them. This was now a selfish reason to have kids. We weren't really getting anywhere... selfish reasons for, selfish reasons against. Self, self, self, me, me, me.

Time passed and life went on. I started to question whether it would even be a good idea to bring kids into this world, with the way things were going- our country's economy... the crazy things going on in the Middle East. Not only that but I was watching friends that had toddlers to teenagers and wasn't sure I wanted any of those issues. Ever. So I really pondered this. I love babies, but that stage is gone fast and then it's years of work and worry as you try to shape a free willed mind to love God and obey Him when so few other people are asking the same. I was pretty serious about this, but Blake thought he wanted to experience fatherhood and teaching our kids things. He thought that sounded like fun. Ya, fun for him, I thought. Still lots of work and worry for me. Also he only said this once or twice, usually he just 'joked' about how much he didn't want kids with other people. So I wasn't sure how seriously he'd been taking this or how seriously I could take him.

Time continued to go on and we were growing together and, more importantly, together toward God. My heart softened during a small group study of the book The Excellent Wife toward my role as a Biblical wife and woman. I started to long to stay home and do my duty as a wife, a feeling I did not have before. I had learned during my stint of unemployment that staying home had it's benefits, and a stay-at-home-wife lifestyle sounded great (that took care of the stay-at-home part.. now I just needed to get to -mom rather than -wife). Through this study, our marriage really blossomed too, we were really communicating now and were following a much more Biblical framework for marriage (i.e., leading husband, submissive wife), which had previously been a little unbalanced. It's amazing how working on your own behaviors, actions and motives can have positive change your spouse's behaviors, actions and motives.. without even trying. It's also amazing how much better God's plan for a healthy marriage works than your own selfish stab at it.

Time went on, we were very happy where we were at when... It finally hit me. My love of babies (I truly do LOVE babies) went into overdrive after holding a friend's newborn. I was baby CRAZY. My mommy gene was in overdrive for a baby. But... I still wasn't sure about the toddler to teenage years. I obviously wasn't going to bring a kid into this world because I wanted to enjoy 12-15 months of it's eternal life. That would just be irresponsible.

It was during this time that we started to consider foster parenting. We could try to foster only babies! Maybe older kids as we got the hang of things. This seemed to be a way to meet my baby-only desire while doing some good. In all seriousness, being a foster parent (and adoption) has always been on my heart and I thought why not now. Getting started now, would make it more likely that we'd do it in the future too. I was afraid that we'd get too comfy in our lifestyle and never take that leap. Just because we weren't ready for a lifelong parenting commitment, didn't mean that we couldn't love some kids right now. We prayed and prayed and prayed.

Through orientation (a mandatory step in the process) we discovered that there wasn't a great need for foster parents that are willing to take only one kid and only ages 0-12 months, most infants seemed to come in sibling sets, and we didn't have the room to be set up for more than one kid, or specifically one over 12 months (infants are allowed to sleep in a crib in the parents' room, so we had room for them). Also, we realized that even if we could have offered our spare bedroom to an older kid (my brother stayed with us routinely for work and the bedroom was 'his') we weren't ready to parent a kid that needed real parenting. An infant needs attention and love, but less parent know-how and experience. That is what we felt able to provide... beginner parenting only. We realized that we wanted to go through the natural stages of becoming a parent, starting with itsy-bitsy infant and learning as they grew.

THIS WAS HUGE. We really did want to be parents! Not yet, but we found ourselves wanting this parent thing in sequence, and continuing past infancy! Someday, we really did want to be parents of real children that would grow up into *gasp* toddlers and *GASP* possibly beyond!

At some point during all of this we also had a tiny pregnancy scare and realized some important things in those few days:

1. We were not, nor were we ever, going to feel fully "ready".
2. We would happily accept the challenge if this was what God was putting before us.
3. We were ridiculously unable to afford for me to stop working.
   and most importantly:
4. We never even stopped to ask our Father if we should have kids or when He might want this to happen.

That was a crazy feeling. I never thought about our assumed *right* to have or not have children as anything other than just that: our right to choose (I'm not talking pro-choice in that sense. We are firmly pro-life). Were we willing to ask God, and if so, were we willing to listen to the answer?

As it turned out, we asked, we listened, we were not pregnant nor did we feel the calling to be so.

We entered a new stage of willingness to obey if called 'early', planning on when I am thirty, preparing our finances, changing our lifestyle to fit this goal, and praying that God would lead us in all of these areas. So that now when it is time to take the leap, we will enter with faith and trust that we've done what we can do to be prepared.

Last Sunday we brought it up again and reconfirmed our thoughts on this timeline. We talked excitedly, looking forward to the day when we might begin that journey. We also recalculated the spreadsheet to make sure we were on track for our 'plan' (thanks, Blake!). We feel convicted that in the meantime it is our responsibility to do what we can to prepare so that I can be a stay-at-home-momma. If, in fact, a momma is what God calls me to be.

It is certainly my heart's desire (now), to be a momma, but I am also willing to consider that God may have a plan for us other than the 'settle down, buy a house and have kids' plan. Just because it's what I want (now), doesn't mean that I'm closing my mind to the possibility that it may not be what God wants. He may be leading us to financial freedom in order to send us to the mission field. Whatever it is, I have given up my life in exchange for the one He has for me, and I will follow wherever He leads us... down the path of motherhood or not.

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That is my journey toward motherhood, thus far.

(To be continued...)

The next installment: Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock