Happy Birthday to Abby, Our Creative Trooper Princess

          My older daughter is three now. 

          Normally on birthdays celebrated over social media, people post baby/toddler pictures to show how much someone has grown, or “how far he/she has come.” I actually can’t help it but think about how far we can trace Abby back in our crazy and chaotic married/family life. 

          When I first found out my wife was pregnant with Abby, I was a seminary student scrambling behind a sound board at a church plant. When we went to Lake Geneva for our 1-year anniversary, Abby was a baby bump. Christina held her first baby shower while I was doing missions work in Romania. 

          It was a foggy damp night as we drove 20 miles through empty Chicago roads to the big hospital in Evanston, IL (home to the Big Ten’s Wildcats) for Abby to be delivered. She was the 2-week-old star of the Thanksgiving reunion as our parents and some grandparents from both sides of the family crammed into our quaint 2br apartment in a lower-income part of the northwest ‘burbs. 

          When I graduated from seminary, Abby was there. When we moved to Memaw’s house for lack of employment, Abby was there, sleeping in a playpen. And now she’s been courageously participating in the community of our new church family. She likes to dance and sing on the stages at church and wants to go to Awana and ballet class. 

          She was along for the ride of the adventurous and sometimes troubling transitions of our family’s life. 

          A little known story about Abby: Just a few months into Christina’s pregnancy, there came a day that her stomach was so sensitive that she couldn’t even keep water down. We took her to the emergency room late one night to get rehydrated with an IV. I sat and watched my wife sleep there in the half-room, worried about both her and my child in utero. We didn’t know what to expect when Christina was stabilized and a doctor came in to do a sonogram.

          But what we saw was our little baby, bouncing around the womb and clapping her hands. “Oh, you’ve got a feisty one there,” the doctor smiled and said. Our Abby’s a trooper.

          Abby, you are, stubbornly and willfully, our creative little drama-princess. I hope you never lose your imagination or your bleeding heart. I like it when you cuddle up to one of your parents or give your little sister a hug or some help. I like it when you sing and dance, or try different color dresses on your princess dolls. I like it when you take conversational initiative with guests and visiting family, sometimes even more hospitably than me. It’s my privilege to raise you, and you’ll never lose my love and support as a father.