9 Months!

Cora is 9 months old today! It's like she woke up and decided, "hey, I'm getting up there in months, I should probably master this crawling thing. Well, today seems as good a day as any...." She's been all over the place this morning! I put her down in her room and she meandered her way to the front room for a while before heading back down the hall to our bedroom. She was having so much fun that she didn't want to go down for her first nap; I think she was so proud of her new skill that she wanted to practice it more. I fear we will have our hands full with our now mobile little creature....

I was talking to a friend and we were ruing the fact that our tiny babies are growing so quickly; fortunately though, each stage has been more fun than the last. I think that helps me to not mind quite as much. I mean, look at this little face - so proud that she is "soooo biiiig." Much more fun than the little needy blob we brought home from the hospital (I can say that because I love her).

Obedience & Parenting

I really worry a lot about being a good parent. I worry about being both too strict and too lenient; about looking like the bad guy in front of friends and strangers; I worry that I will royally mess my kid up. I hope (and pray) that I can be consistent while also knowing that there is no such thing as perfection (on my part or of that of the child). This article by John Piper is good encouragement to persevere in requiring obedience:

I am writing this to plead with Christian parents to require obedience of their children. I am moved to write this by watching young children pay no attention to their parents’ requests, with no consequences. Parents tell a child two or three times to sit or stop and come or go, and after the third disobedience, they laughingly bribe the child. This may or may not get the behavior desired. 

Last week, I saw two things that prompted this article. One was the killing of 13-year-old Andy Lopez in Santa Rosa, California, by police who thought he was about to shoot them with an assault rifle. It was a toy gun. What made this relevant was that the police said they told the boy two times to drop the gun. Instead he turned it on them. They fired 

I do not know the details of that situation or if Andy even heard the commands. So I can’t say for sure he was insubordinate. So my point here is not about young Lopez himself. It’s about a “what if.” What if he heard the police, and simply defied what they said? If that is true, it cost him his life. Such would be the price of disobeying proper authority.

You can read the whole article here; it has some really good reminders.

"Parenting Does Not Create the Child"

A friend of mine shared this article today:

Parenting has become more complicated than it needs to be. It used to be, as far as I can tell, that Christian parents basically tried to feed their kids, clothe them, teach them about Jesus, and keep them away from explosives. Now our kids have to sleep on their backs (no, wait, their tummies; no, never mind, their backs), while listening to Baby Mozart and surrounded by scenes of Starry, Starry Night. They have to be in piano lessons before they are five and can’t leave the car seat until they’re about five foot six.

It’s all so involved. There are so many rules and expectations. Parenting may be the last bastion of legalism. Not just in the church, but in our culture. We live in a permissive society that won’t count any sin against you as an adult, but will count the calories in your kids’ hot lunch. I keep hearing that kids aren’t supposed to eat sugar anymore. What a world! What a world! My parents were solid as a rock, but we still had a cupboard populated with cereal royalty like Captain Crunch and Count Chocula. In our house the pebbles were fruity and the charms were lucky. The breakfast bowl was a place for marshmallows, not dried camping fruit. Our milk was 2%. And sometimes, if we needed to take the edge off a rough morning, we’d tempt fate and chug a little Vitamin D. 

As nanny parents living in a nanny state, we think of our children as amazingly fragile and entirely moldable. Both assumptions are mistaken. It’s harder to ruin our kids than we think and harder to stamp them for success than we’d like. Christian parents in particular often operate with an implicit determinism. We fear that a few wrong moves will ruin our children forever, and at the same time assume that the right combination of protection and instruction will invariably produce godly children. Leslie Leyland Fields is right: “One of the most resilient and cherished myths of parenting is that parenting creates the child.”
Excerpt from Crazy Busy, A (Mercifully) Short Book About a (Really) Big Problem