Happy Fourth Birthday

My baby turned four at 7:48-ish this morning.  It feels like decades, and yet just moments, have passed since the most wonderful doctor in the world greeted Mark and I at 7:30 am on the first floor of Henrico Doctors Hospital with his confident grin and assured us that Van Morrison indeed would be playing on cable radio in the OR for my entire C-section and that he was about to present me with a beautiful healthy baby girl, completely pain free. And he was right!

Such a remarkable contrast to dark memories of just about two years earlier when I laid on a similar hospital gurney curled up into ball onto my side as a wonderful, but far less cheerful doctor performed a spinal tap and then quietly told my husband that I was very sick. It took a long time to recover from meningitis and all that came with it. It took a long time to trust that God had a plan that had more than pain and shortcomings meant for me.

And then randomly one July evening in 2006, with no pre-planning, no supportive studies, no doctor visits, no proven techniques... I took a pregnancy test and saw the undeniable line that literally and figuratively started the path of the journey for the rest of my life. With that line, my life that was all mine ended and was replaced by a life whose most important job was to lead a unit of us.  A cohesive unit unified in all purpose...? Mmmm, not always.  Not during the moments when she wanted to be awake in the middle of the night and I wanted to be asleep! Or the moments I am trying to get the bed time routine accomplished and she is trying to explain a make-believe story taking place in her mind. Or when I am trying to get us out of the house to go to school in the mornings and she is baking a pretend cake in the oven that is almost ready, and then simply must get frosted and not in a hurried sort of way mommy, and I need to learn to be patient.  Some days I feel nothing more than a lamppost, lighting the way, or maybe even a guardrail on an interstate, with my job to be to keep just one car on the road (but withstand a lot of slamming into during bad weather).

I love so many things about my Sadie at four years old.  I love her steel trap memory and keen observation skills, I love her empathy toward animals (both real and stuffed) and vegetables (also both real and stuffed), and friends. I love that she has a sense of performance and vigor (for shows often in front of said animals and vegetables); I love her love of learning and adventure. I love that she asks why some people say "I don't care" and then says "Caring is what you are supposed to do, silly!" I love her look of determination when she rides her bike down steep hills and overcomes certain fears. And I the grin that appears on her face when we compliment a picture she has recently drawn or a list of words that she has written. I love the look on her face every night moments after she falls asleep, when she takes her thumb out of her mouth and rolls towards me unconsciously and I can study her eyelids and her cheeks and her hairline from inches away, and her sweet mouth that still relaxes in a sort of smile just like it did when she slept as an infant in my arms. I love that when Mark asks her to stop growing up so fast she looks at him thinks for a minute and says "Well Daddy I have to grow up, but I will stay little awhile longer so don't be sad OK?"

And I love that she has made me a better person. I love that after 37 years of putting myself first and my own goals and successes first in my own mind, I am no longer identified by them, or even guided by them. Now, even if fail at numerous other things in my life, like professional accomplishments, a clean and orderly house, a svelte and healthy body, etc., that I can go to bed every single night knowing that I succeeded at something far greater than those other things combined. I played some role in raising my daughter for another day. I assisted on her journey for another day.  I kept her on the interstate and out of the ditch.

Yesterday at Sadie's school was dress as your favorite Bible character day. There was no doubt in our minds that Sadie would choose to be Jonah, or rather, Archibald Asparagus dressed up as Jonah from the Veggie Tales movie. Sadie loves the Veggie Tales and we spend every day reading the stories and listening to the CD, but Jonah has an especially high ranking in her mind. Interestingly, she actually understands the most difficult concept for me as an adult which is at end of the movie (or the end of the Bible story which we all know) in which Jonah really doesn't learn much after all and still wishes that God would wipe the people from Nineveh from the face of the earth. While she loves the middle of the story, and its lasting messages, where a team of angels with incredible voice and singing talent tells Jonah that God is a God of second chances, and knows every word to that song, she has this really great way of understanding that at the end, Jonah still has a hard time understanding that God is the God of second chances. And so do we.

Sadie's costume was wonderful and I was so impressed with it all (thank you Tyler who worked endlessly on designing it, I am sure, with demands from Sadie ringing in her ears). But best of all is the scroll which is here. Sadie wrote the words on it herself.

She is, unmistakeably, my message from the Lord.

And I am thankful.