Hello everyone! I pray your holiday weekend was enjoyable! Our little growing family spent our four day vacation spending quality time together. Our schedules don’t make it easy to carve out family time on a regular basis so we take advantage when we have the opportunity. The highlight of our bonding time was taking our daughter to SeaWorld Aquatica! We live 30min. from the amusement park and we’ve had season tickets since the park opened this year but I avoided the water park. Partly due to the fact that our daughter loves animals so I mainly take her to see the whale shows and Sesame Place of course! My husband and I were both excited to watch our little one experience the water park for the first time. As you can imagine, the park was packed with tourists and sprinkled with a few locals, like us. We managed to carve out a less congested area of the pool to allow our daughter to splash around without fear of getting trampled. We took a plethora of photos and videos of her experience to record the moment. It certainly won’t be her last time going to the park with us in tow but recording her first attempts will mark a special place in her childhood once it has past.

I grew up in a two parent household surrounded by love, in the depths of turmoil; I know the precious value of the past. The Bible says that “love covers all” and I know that to be true. When I look back on my childhood, I remember the love more prevalent than the pain. Yes, there was a lot of pain, but my emotional interpretation of it is compartmentalized into isolated incidents, as opposed to having it (pain) blanket my entire experience. To the best of my ability, I want to give my daughter a beautiful past, rich in love, riddled with life lessons and strong enough to sustain her through the trials and tribulations that lie ahead. I want her security blanket to be the unconditional love she receives from her parents and GOD when she gets rejected by the flawed “love” of: romance, friendship or even family. As parents, are responsible for shaping her definition of love until it’s time for her to independently determine it for herself. My husband and I take pleasure in our role as her parents but we also respect the amount of responsibility it comes with.

Our 1yr old came into this world a blank slate, she didn’t know how to laugh, smile, hug, speak, hate or love. I didn’t have much interaction with newborns prior to becoming a Mother so I was fascinated to discover how much of a blank slate newborns are. I have encountered an immeasurable amount of people with pasts so damaging that it’s taking them a lifetime to recover (some never do). The greatest gift we can give our daughter will be her past. I am intentional about each day I spend with her. I am intentional about how I teach her discipline. I am intentional about the lessons I teach her about humanity through my actions and interactions. I am intentional about my interactions with her Father (all positive but we have yet to achieve perfection), perception is all she has to rely on right now. I don’t want our daughter to view us as flawless because I don’t want her to carry such an unnecessary weight. I want her to eventually observe how her Father and I work together to smooth out our differences. She will observe love, in various forms, through all these things and more. Our prayer is that as she moves into her future and glances back into her past: she knows that she was wanted, feels how much she was loved, takes pride in how she was raised, stands firm in her moral beliefs, fortifies the strength in her family roots by consulting GOD in all things and utilizes good discernment in the fog of confusion.