Our Little Watson Family

"It's still surreal to come home and be handed a real live little being with wide eyes and a wriggling body and little hands that grab onto my shirt." He'd just gotten in from work and stood in the kitchen holding Arabella as he leaned against the counter and smiled at me, then looked back at our baby - wonder and glowy love in his eyes.
They told me marriage would grow a person, and it has.  Grown me if only to see the areas I want to grow in, and how looking like Christ is a long way off. It's expanded my heart, seeing the way my husband loves our baby and how he patiently forgives and displays God's love for me when sometimes it'd be easy to dish back the wrong he's been given.  But at the end of a day when I've been moody or stressed, or down right snappy, I've found him perched at the end of the bed, motioning upward with his thumb for me to pick up my feet so he could slide a towel under and massage them.  Many times in the past year I've shaken my head with wonder, puzzling over why I don't get what I deserve, because this fellow is above and beyond anything I ever could.
Then there's Arabella.  At a little over a month she is beginning to coo and smile and every morning that I wake up to her, I have to put out a finger to touch her little self and make sure she's real.
Motherhood seemed like such a mystery from the outside, veiled to all but the ones who were inside its experience. Anne Shirley saw a similar veil surrounding marriage, and when Diana was on the brink of it, the evidence of it being Strange and Incomprehensible to Anne was all too obvious in Diana's dreamy distance to All Things Present But Fred Wright.
But Motherhood, as it was with marriage, slips onto a body like a shirt, and once in it, there seems to be nothing more normal and natural and uncurious about it than to BE it. To be married is simply the most unstrange thing.

The first year of marriage and the first month of raising a baby have come and gone quietly.  My heart is full to the brim. People have said and keep saying "treasure this time…they grow up so fast". We know it. We've watched her change every day - wrinkly hands and feet growing softer and more cushiony, thin lips growing into plumper pink ones.  Her round, swollen face growing less puffy and more oval, how she begins to follow our voice with her eyes - now turning her head - now she's turning over from stomach to side - now she is growing rolls on her arms and legs and is heavier to pick up from the bed - growing oh so much. And HOW do I treasure it - besides taking as much of it in as possible and feeling my heart 'plum swoll up t'bustin'? When people say it, I wonder if they mean "Stop time and ensure you let this phase soak in completely. When you're done being amazed by it, move on". Of course, they're not saying that. It's impossible to think any phase WILL soak in completely. I must settle for existing in a state of blissful wonder. The only way I've found to "ease the ache of joy", and help my heart expand a little more, is to thank God.  Every time she nurses, every time we sleep, every time she smiles, every time it enters my head throughout the day to do so - thanking Him for something incredible and priceless...for growing my heart to hold the joys He gives, for growing my marriage a whole year, for growing our family and our awe for Him.

"Arabella, do you know your daddy loves you? He loves you so much, darlin'.  In fact, did you know that you are my favorite baby in the whole world? There's lots of babies in the world, Bella Rose, but none of'm are as sweet to me as you."  JB walked the room with her and once again I realized life is made of "these small hours".