Close the Gap

I notice that for the first time since beginning this blog, there's a month that doesn't have a single blog post in it.  So much for my continuing wish to find time to write.  I have greater and greater respect for moms of multiple children who maintain any kind of regular blog, let alone a thought-provoking one.  It seems like I should have more time with only one child, but perhaps I just haven't learned to manage it properly!

I'm probably busier right now than I've ever been.  It often feels to me like I have ADD or what people describe ADD being like, because I often can't spend more than a few minutes on a project at a time, so I have to keep switching my concentration from thing to thing to thing.  If laundry needs to be done, I do it in ridiculously small steps.  One minute I have a chance to take the laundry downstairs, but it might be a few hours before I have another few minutes to sort it.  I keep sort of a running list in my head of the things that I'm trying finish each day and how many steps still need to be done for each task.  This is quite a workout for my brain and the rest of me too - I'm finally down to my pre-Abigail weight.

In the process of this busy-ness, I have had quite a few thoughts that I'd like to put down, but I wonder if many of them might just wait until a time when I have more time.  I'm sure there is going to be such a day, simply because I notice older moms I know do eventually have time to do things like knit or write or quilt again.  It's an amazing thing how becoming a wife and then a mother really does change many things about who I am.  It's not just a status change.  It's a big change in how I function, what I think about, even what I find enjoyable or what bothers me.

For instance, this week Abigail has had a cold.  She's only had three viruses in her life and really sailed through them with flying colors: even the six weeks she spent recovering from RSV when she was two months old didn't include any trips to the ER for bad croup, antibiotics for an ear infection (we took her in but her ears were fine), or much medicinal help beyond saline drops in her nose.  Those are pretty invaluable for keeping a kid from getting bronchitis or ear infections, by the way. At any rate, this week we ran out of her saline drops, so Ben and I took her for a short ride in the car to the drugstore to buy some drops.  It didn't take us longer than five minutes to find the drops, but we found ourselves wandering around the entire store, looking at everything from shampoo to discount candy.  When we were standing in front of the rack with all the travel-size products, we looked at each other and said, "What are we doing here again?" and Ben grinned and said, "This is just what we do when we go out."  And it was fun looking at the stuff in the drugstore.  I found it very enjoyable.

Something that bothers me that didn't used to is how to raise Abigail in such a way that she loves good.  I suppose growing up I became very confident I knew what it took to raise a child so that when they were an adult they would believe in what is good and do what is good.  The older I'm getting, though, the more I'm seeing catastrophic failures in people I grew up with, things happening with them I never thought would and would never, ever want to see happen with my beautiful baby girl.  I'm not sure these things would be seen as catastrophic by everyone, but to me they are frightening.  What I'm seeing is that there is a huge difference between really loving good and looking good and unless you know what to look for, they can look the same for a long, long time.  And I have discovered much to my concern - my fear, really - that I don't see people all that clearly.  Ben sees much more clearly than I do, thankfully, but that doesn't change the uneasiness of beginning to realize how much I don't see and how much I don't know or understand.  And if a person doesn't see clearly, they'll end up somewhere they don't want to be.

Actually, raising Abigail to love good IS simple: Ben and I have to love it.  Because children follow after their parents unless their parents send them away.  So maybe what is fearful about recognizing I don't see clearly is that if I don't see clearly, I don't love good as I ought to.

There are a lot of other thoughts going on, some serious and some simply curious (is it really possible that the Titanic isn't the ship at the bottom of the ocean?  What do you get someone for their birthday if they don't think they're going to be around much longer?  What if we translated every verse in the Bible that said "the Law" as "God's Ways"?) but if I'm going to write anything in the blessing book tonight, I should wrap this up.  If you've missed the past few months of Abigail's pictures since I haven't posted the link on this site, September's pictures are here and October's pictures are here.

Good night!