Everyone has their favorite games to play with babies and toddlers. I love to do interactive games and teach babies the hand motions that go with. Like Mother Goose’s “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker’s man,” and the nursery rhyme “The itsy-bitsy spider”. However, my favorite game to play with babies and toddlers is peekaboo.
I’m 17 months old and I don’t need to learn to talk. I have a language of my own that works perfectly well.
I have read that humor is an antidote for pain. I certainly find it especially important right now to leaven my days with laughter. So, I thought I would share a true and funny story that makes me smile every time I remember it.
One of the benefits of being a chauffeur for your children is that somehow the minute the car starts, you become invisible. Conversations go on in the back seat that you would never have been privy to under other circumstances. I
I forget what I am called to do: to live a fearless life. To choose in my relationships, not the way of fear, but the way of love.
A little bit of magic goes a long way to relieve the long hours and hard work of being a working parent.
Once in a while, when my girls were young, I would stop the car at a park on the way to the sitter’s house in the morning, and we would spend twenty minutes on the slides and swings. We would have the park to ourselves, first thing on a weekday morning. And I got a little extra play time with my girls… The best present in the world for me.
Once I asked my mother what it was like to live through really hard times, like Pearl Harbor and WWII. Mom was a young woman in nursing school when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Mom told me that they gathered around, listening to radios… She said it was hard to believe it had happened, that it didn’t seem real.
How did my mother, who grew up so poor, develop such a strong sense of her own self-worth, such a sturdy self-reliance, and such a strong hope and belief that life had wondrous experiences for her?
Waiting has its gifts. Waiting has taught me patience. Humility. Waiting has knocked the top layer off my ever-present and arrogant assumption that I know what’s best for myself and for everyone else in the world. Best of all, waiting has brought me closer to an always loving, always compassionate God.
This year, I pray, may I focus on the goodness and kindness I see every day in my life, no matter how small.
