It is official. We no longer have a baby in the house! She has turned 5!
The little miss is certainly a force to be reckoned with – from her amazing entry into the world (See Birth Story #7) to her insistence on needing to be nursed all the time to me trying to sleep train her (and failing!) and her persistence in sleeping with us (she still climbs into our bed occasionally). This is a girl who knows exactly what she wants and when she wants it.
(Even as I was blogging this post, she is telling her older sister “I can do it! I can do it!!!” refusing help from her or me.)
I often look at her and marvel at the special gift she is – I lost a baby before her and 2 after her. So every time I look at her, I am reminded again and again that indeed, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. It is easy, when the babies are coming every other year, to assume that it is just life when you trust God with your family size and spacing. But it isn’t. And I am reminded every time I watch her.
With each child, we would pray for God to reveal to us the name he/she was to have. And it was no different with her. We had stuck to Old Testament names for the first 6 but we ran out of appealing female names by the time she came along. Lol! So we went to the New Testament 🙂 Her name, Anna Joy, suits her perfectly. In fact, a man of God who does not know us spoke over her and proclaimed that she is a bringer of joy while praying for her. Yes! Indeed she is!
She makes everyone in the family laugh with her antics – from her non-stop singing of Frozen songs, complete with her attempts to follow the choreography, to her interesting observations to even her mannerisms. Yes, she is sometimes annoying – who isn’t? And still tends to throw temper tantrums, especially when it comes to doing schoolwork. But the laughter she brings to the family is undeniable. Each child brings his/her own blessing to the family and her blessing to us is joy, the name the Lord impressed upon me while I was pregnant.
In fact both her Christian and Chinese name means grace and joy. In other words, you can say God gave us double joy and double grace when she was born – a symbol of what we desperately need when parenting her? Lol! It didn’t occur to me until someone asked me shortly after she was born why we chose her Christian and Chinese names to mean the same thing.
And so, the baby is no more although as the youngest of 7 it would be hard to not see her as one especially since she still retains most of her squishyness from babyhood 😀
* In case anyone is inclined to ask – tongue in cheek or not – we are not looking to have another baby. I am thankful for the children we have. If the Lord should bless us with another (I turn 45 in July, God willing) so be it but the only babies we actively planned and tried for were the 1st 2 children. The rest came as we obeyed the Lord and trusted Him to send these blessings as He saw fit.