All Things Beautiful

I lay in bed this morning listening to bumps and thumps and loud giggles coming from the kids' room. Naomi was laughing and back to bossing her sisters around, "No, Hannah, it goes like this: from my bed, to your bed, to Emma's bed, to Toby's crib, and you can't touch the floor!" More bumps and giggles followed. I lay and listened partly from thankfulness for a few minutes' rest, but mostly from thankfulness that my six-year-old daughter was climbing and jumping and laughing again.

They froze with guilty faces when I entered the room. Hannah tried to act as if she were simply hopping up and down in front of Toby's crib, rather than climbing out of it. But when my stern face broke into a smile they laughed and showed me the "obstacle course" they had created. "And how are your joints doing today?" I asked Naomi, nonchalantly.

"Well how do you think they're doing," she laughed back, "if I am able to climb from bed to bed like this?" Silly me, I guess that was obvious wasn't it? Naomi was so elated that she took off "running" down the stairs, which is always a bit awkward for her, and ended up feeling quite a pain in her hip from that. This dampened her spirits a little, I think, to realize that she wasn't miraculously "cured," but I focused her on how much better she was, and overall she had a great day. She did end up with quite a bit of ankle pain again tonight, which only reminds me that the previous two days were not simply a bad dream from which we will wake up. They are reality now.

Feeling in a reflective mood again tonight, I dug out a journal I had written to Emma when I was pregnant with her. I haven't seen my journals in almost two years. It is good to have access to them again and to have the time to read through them and remember where we've been. When all was worry and fear during the final few weeks of my pregnancy with Emma I penned a poem for her that brought me comfort again tonight. I had had one of many ultrasounds that day and was especially hit by how I saw a beautiful baby on that screen, and how the doctors saw only problems. This is what I wrote on August 11th, 2007:

Magic wand on my belly
Worry on his face
In a sea of black and white
Something's out of place

There are risk and complications
That he'd like for me to see
There's a sorrow on his face
Because you're not who you should be

But I know the one who's making you
Your tiny toes, your precious soul
And I love how he is forming you
He makes all things beautiful
His ways are not our ways
Wrong to them is perfect to him
His thoughts are not our thoughts
He's knitting you and I will praise him
You're exactly who you should be
He's knitting you and I will thank him
You're a beautiful gift to me

In that sea of black and white
There are chubby cheeks, a rounded nose
They're so blinded by what's wrong
Staring at the thorn, they miss the rose