1st Birthday Eve

A year ago, this very minute, our little "Doodlebug" was getting ready to make his debut. It seems ages ago, and it seems like yesterday all at the same time. Tomorrow I'll show you the pictures of his growth over the past 12 months, but tonight, I want to share a passage that has meant so much to me over the past year. It's from the book Stepping Heavenward by Elizabeth Prentiss and is a journal entry written by the author soon after the birth of her third child. (It's an old book, so bear with the old-fashioned jargon.)

"[My sister-in-law] takes a most prosaic view of
this proceeding, in which she detects malice prepense on my part. She says I
shall now have one mouth the more to fill and two feet the more to shoe, more
disturbed nights, more laborious days, and less leisure for visiting, reading,
music, and drawing. Well! This is one side of the story, to be sure, but I look
at the other. Here is a sweet, fragrant mouth to kiss; here are two more feet to
make music with their pattering about my nursery. Here is a soul to train for
God; and the body in which it dwells is worthy all it will cost, since it is the
abode of a kingly tenant. I may see less of friends, but I have gained one
dearer than them all, to whom, while I minister in Christ's name, I make a
willing sacrifice of what little leisure for my own recreation my other darlings
had left me. Yes, my precious baby, you are welcome to your mother's heart,
welcome to her time, her strength, her health, her tenderest cares, to her
lifelong prayers! Oh, how rich I am, how truly, how wondrously blest!"