Babylon to Jerusalem

Things have been really challenging lately. Fox has been having a hard time for some reason. Of course, my first guess is that he’s teething, but it seems like I’ve blamed every challenge on teething from the time he was 3 months old and suddenly became a drool factory, and guess what? Here we are, 7.5 months later, and we still have no teeth. We started sleep training in December so that Fox would learn to sleep in his crib. That was hard, but it was starting to pay off, and for a few weeks we enjoyed regular naptimes, bedtimes, and sleeping through the night from about 6:30pm til 6:00am. Then things started deteriorating. In addition to the napping drama I described in an earlier post, he has started waking up at 4:00 EVERY morning, ready to go. I didn’t really think things could get worse, but the last few nights he has woken up crying 2 or 3 times during the night, and to top it off he still gets up between 4:00 and 5:00 for the day.

At church this Sunday, our pastor baptized a sweet three-month-old baby girl. He typically tells some personal information about the baby and family after the baptism, and he talked about how her parents had been blessed with another “easy” baby who only cries when she’s hungry and is already starting to sleep through the night. For a moment, I found myself feeling wistful and thinking, “Boy, wouldn’t that have been nice.” But I quickly chided myself for these thoughts and thanked God again that He gave Fox into our care exactly as he is. Mike apparently had similar thoughts during the service. Afterwards we were talking, and he observed that that baby’s parents were probably already godly, patient people who could handle being blessed with an easygoing baby (this is conjecture, of course, but work with me here). We, on the other hand, desperately needed Fox, difficulties and all, to expose our sins of selfishness and self-reliance and to help us grow into better, more godly people than we once were. This is a theme we’ve revisited many times over the past 10 months, and it constantly affirms God’s sovereign provision for us. God knew exactly what baby we, Mike and Laura, needed for our own sanctification, and He blessed us so richly by putting that child in our charge. I am so grateful for Fox.

And now for something completely different....

The census was a total bust. I thought there’d at least be more to it so I’d feel like I was filling out a survey or something. Nope. Just a few questions about who lives in my household and when they were born. That’s it. My income taxes were more interesting! Boo.