First Contact

Getting to know your baby is an experience that's hard to put into words.

You come home from the hospital with a little stranger in your arms. You don't know this baby at all. You don't know her preferences, temperament, or language. You're basically making first contact with an alien.

As the baby gets older, she naturally picks up language (which is SO. COOL), but here's what I didn't realize:

We did too.

As Elle was learning English, we were learning Elle.

We've learned when her little "ha" means "help" versus "hot" versus "hat."

We've learned when her rolly hands mean "Sing 'Wheels on the Bus'" and when they mean "Sing 'Stirring My Brew.'" We've learned when her flashy hands mean "All Done" and when they mean "Wipers on the Bus." We've learned that when she plants her hands on the ground with her booty in the air and does a passé, she wants us to sing "Mr. Stand-on-One-Leg."

We can sense when her thrashes and whines at sleep time turn from "I am PROTESTING" to "I am about to PASS OUT."

We've learned the difference between her "I'm hurt" cry and her "I'm angry" cry and her "I'm tired" cry.

We've learned that the eyebrows-raised-and-corner-of-mouth-turned-down face means "Do the squirrel sound."

We've learned that the fist tipping + gushing sound is her miming using a watering can.

We've learned that she actually likes both warm and cold milk and you have to ask which one she's in the mood for.

We've learned that her O-mouth shocked face means she wants to read In the Small, Small Pond by Denise Fleming and her saying "WHO?!" means she wants to read Listen Buddy by Helen Lester.

We've learned that she wants to stroke a piece of our sheets as she's going to sleep.

We've learned that bugs with long legs and touching spider webs make her shudder and do a heebie-jeebies face (and it's the cutest thing in the world).

All these little communications are more art than science, impossible to teach or anticipate. It's something I know all parents experience, but it never occurred to me how magical it would feel. I never understood how people who spoke different languages could ever learn to communicate without someone else having come first to put together a dictionary or a grammar book—and that still blows my mind—but for the first time I'm seeing a glimmer that it is possible.

What an honor to be the first people to decode this delightful, new little human.

~Stephanie

Shortcut to Knowing Me

I had a friend recently start reading my blog, and I was surprised at how much more at ease I felt after learning that. It's hard to get to know people as adults unless you work with them or figure out another way to log lots of hours together. My blog is a pretty effective shortcut (if you count reading hundreds of words "short") to getting to know me. If you like my blog, chances are you'll like me; if you don't like it, chances are you won't. We've saved each other some time and energy 🤣 One of my best friends also started dating someone recently, but they live really far away. I'll never get to log a lot of hours with the person.

These two ideas got me thinking about how I would sum myself up if I needed to. Like, if someone was going to get to know me from a single collection, what would I put in it?

Obviously there's no REAL shortcut to knowing someone, but here are ten pieces of Me that I've curated over the last little while for no reasons other than thought exercise and narcissism 😂 I word-vomited thoughts onto the digital page and then overthought and rephrased them with the goal of getting THE MOST bang for my buck, trying to embed identity into the way they're presented as well as the facts themselves.

1. I have thought "I want that movie directly injected into my veins" about three movies: Dune Part II, The Batman, and Christopher Robin.

2. I love my favorite song of all time, "Take Me Back to Eden" by Sleep Token, so much that I only listen to it a few times a year, as loud as I can stand it, alone or with someone I am certain will not speak.

3. Despite what I may present to make others comfortable, I internally consider all promises to be binding contracts.

4. Gabe's and my wedding cake topper was a guy with brown hair next to a girl with red hair secretly grabbing his butt.

5. I have always felt an older-brother-shaped hole in my soul so profound that I believe I have an unborn sibling waiting for me in Heaven.

6.  I have been writing and rewriting The Fire Faery Story since I was twelve years old, and one day it will be right and be published.

7. I am extremely sensitive to feeling trapped, which inspired Gabe’s and my annual “random road trips” where we get in the car (sometimes without luggage) and drive aimlessly for days, stopping to do anything that seems interesting and leaving when the Force tells us to.

8. If I were a band, I would be Relient K.

9.   One of my favorite days: I came into the living room of our Kernersville apartment while Gabe was watching Archer and we laid around being best friends and watching Archer literally all day and ordered pizza for dinner.

10. I had an unmedicated birth and I am OBSESSED with that experience.

I would really love to hear other people's lists if you want to share in a comment (or text/message if you don't want AI harvesting your personality 🙃)!

~Stephanie

Obedience Gives Me the Ick

Back with another hot take in the Christian world, and this one is straight-up half-baked. It's going back in the oven, but I wanna crack the door and take a peek real quick.

"Obedience" gives me the ick.

Is that because I'm an arrogant, fallen, millennial creature? Very possibly. That's what I want to think through.

I recently heard someone describe their toddler as "obedient," and it made me go

in my head. I brought this reaction up to Gabe later.

"Why does the idea of raising your kids to be 'obedient' give me the ick so bad?"

"Because the goal of raising kids is to train them to be good adults," Gabe said after a minute. "'Obedient' isn't a positive quality in an adult. You don't compliment an adult by saying, 'oh they're so obedient.'"

That rang true for me. We don't want adults to be "obedient" the same way we want children to be, or maybe we just don't use that word. When putting obedience in an adult context, Christian life and the military are what came to my mind first.

The Christian view is obvious: Adults are suppose to be obedient—to God, even when we don't understand, even when we don't like it. It's a choice of submission and a form of dying to ourselves. Children practice being obedient to their parents and authorities as an earthly way to practice being obedient to Christ.

Similarly, soldiers are expected to obey their superior officers even if they don't understand, agree, or like the order. Theirs not to reason why.

Neither the Christian context nor the military one helps me. The term still gives me the ick. Still feels gross. I still cannot imagine using the words "obey," "disobey," "obedient," "disobedient" with Elle. It makes me so physically uncomfortable.

Is it only semantics? Do I just have negative memories associated with those terms? If I use words like "listen," "trust," and "boundaries" instead, does that solve the problem for me?

Yes...but maybe because the connotations and nuances of those words are actually important. To me, obedience has connotations of being on a power trip. A parent makes rules and gets to punish you if you break them. Powerful, powerless. Stronger, weaker. Are the rules there for the child's safety? Yeah—theoretically. I think they're for other reasons more often than adults care to admit, and maybe that's what puts me off.

When kids are "obedient," parents sometimes treat it like a flex. I remember being told a story of someone declaring that he wouldn't stand for his kids to obey someone else better than they obey him. As a result of this declaration, parents in that father's circle suddenly started requiring their kids to use "sir" and "ma'am" when they hadn't before.

Gross. I'm all for southern manners, but that reaction feels so parent-ego-stroking it borders on dom/sub behavior.*

Maybe I'm more sensitive to power dynamics than the average person. (Enneagram Eight much?) Power is intoxicating—corrupting, even. God is Good enough to handle it; people are not—I am not. I need to be very, very careful that I don't become drunk on my role as a parent and use my power to tread on Elle's personhood for the sake of ego or convenience. I do not want her to "obey" me; I want her to trust me. 

However, I also want her to STOP immediately when I say "STOP" so she doesn't get hit by a car.

If we don't want adults to be "obedient" (with synonyms like docile, compliant, submissive) per se, what do we want them to be? What's the healthy, grown-up version of "obedient"? Words like reliable and thoughtful and wise come to my mind. I want to raise Elle to do what she says she will do, to consider how her actions will affect herself and others, and to use good judgment. I hear an argument that the way we train children to develop these attributes is to require obedience of them when they're young. I hear it.

I hear it.

Sigh.

So...where does that leave us? The middle of the Jungle of Parenting, I guess, where only half the mushrooms are edible and the animals might eat you.

I don't think you need to worry that Gabe and I are going to raise a feral brat (even accounting for the We Won't Make Our Daughter Apologize post), although I suppose only time will tell.

🫡 Stephanie out.

~Stephanie

* I do not feel this way about teaching your kids to use "sir" and "ma'am" in general. However, hearing about a parent's requirement of insta-obedience and submission-flavored language and thinking "Ooh, that sounds nice to implement in my home too" hits different.

Facing Demons: Slow Down

It's no secret that things take longer with a toddler. All the things.

That's hard for me. Not only am I impatient, I'm also by nature just fast. I walk through a clothing store and know if I'm gonna buy something or not. My response time (in person) is now. I'm processing the likely end of your sentence before you're verbalizing the middle.

And while I'd love for this to be a brag, it's often not. It means I would've walked by my wedding dress if it hadn't been for Cassidy. I say "no" and realize actually yes, or "yes" and realize actually no. I answer a question you weren't on your way to asking and now you need to start your thought over from the beginning.

Now, a lot of the time I am right about purchases or what you're saying or what we should do, but I'm not sure the stats are quite good enough to justify my obsessive urgency. And I might have always known that but never gotten around to working on it if God hadn't sent us Elle.

Not only are toddlers the ultimate...modifier, but many of our parenting choices exacerbate the slowness. We want her to have the time/space/permission to explore the world and build her skills, which lately means waiting thirty to sixty seconds for her to go down the single step from the laundry room into the garage.

It isn't that she's being stubborn or dillydallying; she's actually trying her little best. The step feels like a cliff to her, and she wants to do it well. She'll squat down, but then decide that isn't the best approach. She'll slide one foot off the edge, but realize she needs to brace herself, so she'll grab the door frame, but she's still standing too far back to reach the floor, so she lets go and repositions and tries again. Then she decides no, that doesn't feel right either, so she tries sitting on her booty and scooting forward. Yes, that's it. Scoot, scoot, scoot. Deep bend at the waist...straighten up...yay! Beaming, clapping, so proud. So beautiful.

So slow.

We have places to be, places we're probably ten minutes late to already. The garage is hot. We are hemorrhaging AC and I'm holding a thousand things and my arm is going numb.

And in the middle of all that, Elle is learning to be a person for the first time, right in front of me.

As I was driving to Mom's birthday celebration today, God sent me a thought that seems obvious now: What if being in the hard, slow, difficult is the thing? I don't need to "get to" anything else. The goal for this season is NOT to be comfortable, not even to have fun, but to be in the moment with my baby, whatever that is. So I'll get a bit hot. So we'll loose eighty cents of air conditioning. So my arm will be a little numb.

Is that really so bad? Can't I just take a shower later, skip a tenth of a coffee, shake out my arm?

Maybe I need to stop rushing, whether that means rushing to the car, rushing to nap time, or—God forbid—actually rushing through precious toddlerhood. At the end of the day, what am I trying to get to so fast? The restaurant will still be there and my family will still love me. My TV shows and books aren't gonna expire.

It's not my turn to eat hot food or sprint to the car or get dressed in one uninterrupted act. It's my turn to watch Elle pick a clover flower and track an airplane across the sky and point out every dog on every bag of dog food in the store. I've been running an imaginary race with no prize at the end.

As I say to Elle a dozen times a day, "that's so silly" ☺️

~Stephanie

Facing Demons: Feel the Feelings

God the Parent

I've never felt more like God than as a parent:

"You can play with anything, anywhere in the room, except in the drawers. Please leave the drawers closed."

Elle: *immediately goes to a forbidden drawer*

It's not that the drawers have anything bad in them. It's just lots of small, probably-toxic-if-ingested pieces of makeup with loose caps; extra toilet paper; hair clips and bands that go missing often enough without help; etc. When Elle is older and can use the items responsibly, it'll be fine to open the drawers and explore.

I'm not just on a power trip, but I'd be lying if I said convenience wasn't at least part of the equation. I've already sacrificed the bathroom cabinets and the bedroom closet. I've made peace with those spaces being disorganized and having to corral items after every bout of toddler exploration. I'm drawing the line at the drawers.

It is interesting to ponder the parallels between my bathroom and the Garden of Eden. So much freedom versus one request. One who understands the nuances of what's off-limits, one who is still learning. Boundaries, trust, testing from both sides.

My dad and I have often had conversations about the Tree of Knowledge. How long were Adam and Eve in the garden before eating the fruit? What would have happened if Adam and Eve had eaten from the Tree of Life first? What if Adam and Eve had never eaten the forbidden fruit, but their kids had? The question "Was the Tree to be off-limits forever?" is what I've been thinking about today. Maybe God just wanted Adam and Eve to stay away until they knew not to swallow concealer caps, remain innocent until they had more life under their belts.

Figuratively—y'know—cuz they were naked.

Most of my limits for Elle are for her safety and will change as her mind and body mature—but some of them are for my convenience. There's nothing dangerous about taking her outfits apart and strewing them around the room, but it's annoying to reorganize so she isn't allowed to do that.

Was God's command not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge entirely for Adam and Eve's safety, or was it partly for his convenience?

The serpent would certainly have us believe the latter, but I tend not to think so. As a human, my patience is extremely limited, but God's isn't. He may groan when we commit the same sin for the umpteenth time, but it isn't because he's fed up or annoyed that he has to clean up after us; it's because he wants us to experience fullness and joy. I think God has the capacity to be completely Good; none of his commands or decisions are "selfish" the way we define it. They are selfish in that they're about him, but only because he is Good. God does things for The Good, and that happens to align with him every time because he is the ultimate Good.

In a perfect world, where I was perfect, would I not have any rules that were purely for convenience? Now that I'm thinking about it, no. I would still have rules that were for "convenience," because it is good to learn to respect others' time/work/items. In the short run, keeping Elle out of certain areas is half for safety, half convenience, but in the long run, it's more like half-safety, half-practicing consideration. Or a quarter-practicing consideration and a quarter practicing self-control.

I might be losing my train of thought here.

To sum up: being a parent makes me think about God more, respecting boundaries is a good skill to practice early.

~Stephanie