The Purple Circle

Wow.  This is my 70th post.  I’m sure I’d be close to 100 posts (or more!) if I counted my former blog in this count.  To think where I started, and how far I have come.  Wow.  When I first started blogging (back on my old page), I was preparing to be a mommy.  I was so excited about decorating the nursery, buying and washing and sorting tiny baby clothes, and was just renewing my knowledge of sewing.  It was January of 2012, and I was starting a new resolution to blog about my adventures as a mom.  I don’t by any means know truly all about being a mom yet.  I’m not sure I’ll really know what it’s truly like to be a mom until the day I die.  Because the scope of the duties of being a mom is something that seems to change every single day, and the more I think I know, the more I discover that I don’t know.

When I started that blog, I had lofty goals for my child – my child that at that point, I didn’t even know was a baby girl.  (Though I had my suspicions!)  I had lofty goals, and ya know what, she is surpassing them all.  This little angel is more amazing than I could have ever imagined.  She’s not yet 14 months old and she recognizes and can say the colors purple and blue.  She knows the shape circle.  (Though it often sounds like “gurgle”.)  And its in that moment when she says “gurgle” and points to the polka dots on the red teacup in her “Colors” book, that I realize we’ve come so much further than I ever thought possible in this past year and a half that I’ve been blogging.

I never dreamed my one year old would be wearing 3T clothes, and when I ask which shirt she wants that she would say “purple” and reach for the purple shirt of the three options I’d given her.  I never dreamed she’d be signing “fish” and saying “sh! sh!” over and over as she stares at the fish in the floor-to-ceiling sting ray tank at Sea World.  I never dreamed she would say “nuggle” and put her head in my neck and let me snuggle with her.  I couldn’t have even imagined the swell of pride, and the rush of love I feel in those moments.

She is so smart.  She is so happy (most of the time), and she is so strong willed.  Usually her will is to make Mommy and Daddy happy, but sometimes it’s to throw her food on the floor and make our dogs, “Bobo” (Boko) and Daisy happy.  But through it all, her greatest joy is to hear us say she’s a good girl, and she loves to parrot back to us, “Goo Gir.”  She WANTS to please, she WANTS to receive praise, and thankfully, we can usually give her that which she desires.  The times when I have to say “no” and pat her hand bring me back to the purple circle – I know that as with all academic knowledge, obedience must be taught – and sometimes learned the hard way.  And I’m thankful.  Life isn’t easy.  Life isn’t fair.  All of life isn’t roses.

But when you have a beautiful little girl who wants “uppy” for an “ug” and to “nuggle,” even when times are hard and that little girl stresses you out, there are times like looking at a book and spying the “gurgles” and picking out the purple shirts that remind us that what we teach matters.  I never could have imagined back when I first started blogging how important a job being a mom is… I had head knowledge, but now… now I have heart knowledge.  For just as she has to learn by doing, so do I.

May I always be the mommy God desires for me to be, and when I fail, because I will, may He always pick me back up and set me on the straight and narrow… and give me the strength to do the same with my precious baby girl.

Reading to her monkey, George, about ducks –
sitting in her rocking chair from Granny and PawPaw.
(She LOVES ducks.)