Eight Months

Merry Christmas! Sorry it's late! I hope your Christmas was as beautiful as mine. I love spending time with my family and recognizing just how much the Lord has blessed my life. It is full of peace and joy and love--all because of Him.

It's been a busy week and my blog has fallen to the wayside. I'm sure you've been dying for the fourth installment of my love story, but you're going to have to die a little longer because I will probably not continue it until tomorrow. Or later today. We'll see how I feel.

Today I want to wish Baby Brown Eyes a happy eight-month birthday. It feels like just yesterday and ages ago when the midwife put his slippery little body on my chest and I saw those beautiful eyes (blue-gray then) for the very first time. A friend of mine described motherhood perfectly when she said it's like having your heart outside of you. I love my son so much it breaks my heart.

He's changed a lot in eight months. Now he rolls over and gets up on his hands and knees in preparation for crawling. He laughs and smiles and picks up toys and chews on whatever he can get his hands on (including his father's nose). He even has two tiny teeth.

I've changed a lot in these eight months, too. When I think back to those first days having Baby home, it was like I was a teenage girl babysitting for someone else. It was so unreal. I was so clueless. Someone told me before Baby was born that mothering came naturally, instinctively. It didn't for me, though. It took a couple months for me to feel like a mother. There were moments when Baby was a newborn that I wondered what on earth I'd gotten myself into. He upset the balance of my perfectly-ordered life. I found myself constantly praying for help. And you know what? Help constantly came. If Baby was crying and I had no idea why, or if he wouldn't nurse, or if I was just exhausted to the point of losing my sanity, little nudges and impressions would come to my mind, telling me what to do. Simple things like rocking him or changing his onesie, or even just setting him down and taking a deep breath, but things that I wouldn't have thought of on my own. And as He guided me, Heavenly Father gradually turned me into a mother.

Not that I've got the whole motherhood thing down. Not hardly. But I've learned a whole lot in these last eight months. And I'm sure I'll learn a whole lot more in the next eight. And for the rest of my life.

Ok, so that ended up being a bit longer than I meant it to be. In short, Happy Eight Months, Baby Brown Eyes, even though you can't read yet and if you got a hold of this you'd probably slobber all over it.

Love Your Happy Mother,
The Brown-Eyed Girl