![\"White](\"http:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/01\/img_5517-300.jpg\")
<\/p>\nI got an overdue haircut yesterday (somehow I missed December; anybody see it go past?), and while I’ve had some silvery hair since high school, I was surprised to see how much more there was in the clippings as they cascaded past my eyes. Is this Lucy’s doing? <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
p{color:gray}. Photo: This post is about _Papa’s_ white hair, not Lucy’s new polar-bear snowsuit. (But isn’t it cute?)<\/p>\n
Mostly, we’re pleased to report, Lucy’s doing really, really well! As Ann “noted last week”:\/2006\/mama-baby-attempt-fun, Lucy transitioned to sleeping at night with one arm out of her swaddling. But that’s not the half of it: she spontaneously, and apparently easily, dropped one of her two night feedings, too! She now goes down quite quickly around 6:PMish and (after an optional fussing session about 40 minutes later) sleeps straight through till a 4:AMish feed! Ten hours, we wouldn’t have believed it.<\/p>\n
The feeding she dropped — the one we called the “dream feed,” around 10:30 or 11:PM — had been a longstanding fixture of her day, so who knows how these changes happen. She just did it. (Ann has already started getting misty-eyed saying, “I miss that special dream-feed time with Lucy.” Awww…) It’s been great for us to hit the hay and sleep half the night, knowing that Lucy’s sleeping so great, too. Plus, now Mama and Papa can go on a hot date without a curfew!<\/p>\n
So why the white hair? It’s just that I’ve been noticing that, despite all of Lucy’s constant strides of development, it’s still so easy for me to worry about how she’s doing.<\/p>\n
* Is today’s little sniffle going to blossom into something big?
\n* Are this week’s daytime nap troubles going to turn into a permanent struggle?
\n* What’s with that little shivery grunt she’s been doing, some kind of muscular spasm or just her usual enthusiasm?
\n* Are we doing the right thing to go along with Lucy’s continued desire to be “swaddled”:\/news\/2006\/luv-2-b-swaddled\/ for sleep?<\/p>\n
I’ve been praying that God would grow my capacity to absorb — no, deflect — the stress and anxiety, when it comes along. In other spheres of life where I feel stress, I can sometimes “chill out” by remembering that after all the stakes aren’t so high; but of course that’s not the case here: Lucy and Ann and this family are immeasurably precious. And I know that the worries don’t go away, maybe ever, about one’s children. So I long to be a father who can rest in God’s provision.<\/p>\n
But this feels like one of those tasks that’s too big to handle by tackling head-on. As Dallas Willard says (in “_The Spirit of the Disciplines_”:http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0060694424\/octothorppres-20), some spiritual tasks require small spiritual disciplines to accomplish. Any ideas, then, about what spiritual disciplines are useful for learning to rest in God’s care for one’s children and family?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I got an overdue haircut yesterday (somehow I missed December; anybody see it go past?), and while I’ve had some silvery hair since high school, I was surprised to see how much more there was in the clippings as they cascaded past my eyes. Is this Lucy’s doing?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kids"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boydsnest.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}