New Babies – The cuddly kind and...?



Four day old Haylee Mae
and brother Adam


We forget so quickly how tiny a very new baby is. A beautiful addition to our family arrived five days ago. Haylee’s little brother here getting “up close and personal” was about the same size less than two years ago. His little “almost two” personality is becoming more and more evident every day. His latest sentence? Unfortunately it is “Don’t want to!” (And with the exclamation mark.) Mmm...wonder how old Haylee will be when she says similar things as an alternative to “No!”

And so our babies continue to grow until they become more and more independent and we have to release them at last into their own big world “out there.” Haylee reminded both my husband and I so vividly what her father looked like all those years ago - about the same size with that thick mop of very black hair that these days shows tinges of gray. And when he moved out of home to start university a long way from home, it wasn’t always easy to let him go. I am sure he will find it also hard when Haylee and our five other wonderful grandchildren want to spread their wings.

Besides my own birth-pangs with our three children, I’ve had other very different, but still “birth-pangs”, with each manuscript I’ve written. Certainly most of them have taken longer than 9 months before they have developed enough to say they are “full term” and “The End” at last written. However, then comes more waiting time as we had with our own three children and now our grandchildren. The manuscript still has to “grow” through that careful read through. (Watching for any gaps in plot, characters acting “out of character”, dialogue. correct Point of View.) No head-hopping allowed? And as each new baby teaches the parent more, so this writer continues to learn with every one of her written “babies”.

And after each manuscript has been sighed over and I have at last had to resist trying to change anything, it has to be sent out into the wide world of editors, publishers. Hopefully, one day it will be out there on bookshelves for readers to enjoy, judge it too – first by that cover and then those inner contents.

No matter how attractive (or not) the outward appearances of our precious babies become, I pray they will have that true and lasting inner beauty that only the indwelling of Christ by His Holy Spirit can bestow upon them. We can try to teach and nurture by example and words, but it is still those babies growing to maturity who ultimately have to find their own destinies. My greatest “tool” as a grandmother is to maintain my own relationship with Christ and pray and pray and “be there” for them when needed.