I don't know, but...

I think she might feel better!

Tiny girl got into my velcro circles while I was in the shower this morning.  She also had some cereal for breakfast, thus the milk mustache/goatee she's got going on.  Incidentally, did you notice the one foot in focus and the back foot was blurry in the first picture.  Oh yeah, fancy new lens.
I asked her what she was doing and she said she was putting on stickers.  There are stickers in her basket downstairs, so I thought that's what she meant.  It wasn't.  So funny.

In my last post, I mentioned that God showed me something when I was in the hospital with Harper. I was actually telling Candy what it was today and I realized it doesn't sound all that earth-shattering, but it was big for me.  For about the last two months I have really struggled with parenting Harper.  So much so, that I was beginning to doubt my love for her.  Not that I felt I didn't love her at all, but I was worried that my love for her was conditional.  The phase that she's in right now is not pretty-lots of power struggles, lots of disobedience and I find that I don't like her very much sometimes.  But those times started to be kind of a lot and I began to worry that I didn't love her very much sometimes. And then we had the big potty training debacle right before Christmas and that just solidified my worry.  I have never lost control so completely and I was mad at her for 2 whole days. 

Something I tell my children a lot is "Nothing you could ever say or do would make me stop loving you."  This was and is very easy to say to Garrett.  But with Harper, it was starting to feel not true.  And that scared me.  To steal a cheesy phrase from Dr. Phil, I want to be my family's "soft place to land".  I would never want her or Garrett to feel like my love for them was based on performance.

But sitting in that hospital room holding my daughter who was so hot I could barely touch her, I realized that I have no reason to worry about the depth of my love for her.  I think my feelings of late towards her are real and it's hard right now, but at the core it is not possible for me to not love her. She's my baby girl, my gift from my Heavenly Father. And that will never change.