All parents remember that awesome and frightening feeling when their first child is born. You take all the parenting and childbirth classes, you read all the books and talk to other parents about raising kids so you’ll know what to do when your baby arrives. There is all the excitement and terror that comes when the wife declares, “This is it! This isn’t a drill! The baby is coming!”
You either forget everything you trained for or you work together like a well-oiled machine and everything goes like clockwork. Most likely, it was the former and not the latter. Hopefully, you husbands didn’t dash out the door and leave your wife standing there waiting for you to take her to the hospital… or does that only happen in the movies? My wife actually got left at home on our wedding day. Everyone left for the church and she didn’t have a ride to her own wedding. This was before cell phones! But that’s another story.
The funniest thing about firstborns is how new parents take every precaution in the book to sterilize everything. Take, for example, the pacifier. If it hits the floor, you boil it in water and make sure every possible germ is gone before you put it back into the crying baby’s mouth. A dirty diaper causes a full wardrobe change… just in case. You quarantine the newborn from anyone who even clears their throat. They could be banished from your home for weeks.
Subsequent children, unfortunately, don’t get the same treatment. Dropped the pacifier? Just wipe it off on your jeans, blow on it, and shove it back in. The kid can take it! Dirty diaper? She can stay in this outfit until she has a blow-out diaper. You have a cold? Ten foot perimeter please! But can you watch the kids while we go out to dinner?
Well, today is our firstborn’s birthday. We actually only sterilized everything for her first few months and then we realized that we probably weren’t going to break her. Okay, she fell off a three-foot high bed onto the parquet floor and got two black eyes on Easter Sunday when she was six months old, but that doesn’t count. She survived and has grown into a remarkable wife, mother, and woman of God. I am so proud of her and love her with all of my heart. Happy birthday to my sweet, beautiful firstborn! You will always be Daddy’s little girl!
Psalms 127:3 (NLT) - “Children are a gift from the Lord; they are a reward from him.”