Outnumbered 10 to 1…

A note of apology to my readers...  for those of you who came here to read the post from yesterday morning and found nothing...  I wrote the post offline in Word and then posted it and discovered the pictures did not post.  Tried to fix the problem but did not have time.  Shauna says she could have told me it wouldn't work, personal experience...  :-)  So, without further ado, here's my post from 24 hours ago...

We have developed a Christmas tradition of my wife, my daughter, my granddaughters, and some friends, of getting together to bake Christmas cookies.  So, you ask, why am I posting about that in the middle of January??  Glad you asked.  When one of the participants is a medically fragile infant who is DS, and the friends have been a little sick, you don’t get together… until January 8^th.  THEN you bake cookies. J

Lots of little helping hands.

Did you know cookie cutters work best upside up?  They work upside down too, just not quite as well…

Cadence preferred Grammy’s help outside of the big crowd.

Clarisse really liked putting sugar on the cookies.  There are four cookies under there somewhere…

Everybody got in on it.  Except me, I took pictures…

...and the other Mom, who held Reagan, who seemed to be just fine with that.

The end result…  can you tell which ones Clarisse decorated?

Of course, any cookie decorating party has to end with eating them, but don’t worry, there were a couple left for “Papa” to “dust”.

And I even survived being outnumbered 10 to 1…  J

"Papa"

Holding Papa's hand... The Sequel

This morning when I picked up my granddaughter, she was way too busy holding the picture she had drawn with both hands while she was looking at it to be bothered with holding my hand.  As expected, halfway across campus she lost track of me and was suddenly standing there looking around trying to find me...  Yes, she quickly decided that holding Papa's hand was really a good idea...

This is the place where I leave the application up to you...

"Papa"

Holding Papa's hand...

Sunday morning I picked up our oldest granddaughter from her Sunday School class.  As we were walking across campus through crowds of people it suddenly occurred to me that here she is, 3 years old, not three feet tall, being lead through a "land of giants" where all she can see is a bunch of knees, yet she has total faith that as long as she is holding the hand of her Papa she will be safe and be lead to Grammy and Mama.

How like this do our lives need to be.  Life brings things into our paths, sometimes very scary things.  Whether it's serious injury, illness, ending hours of labor with the discovery that you're brand new little baby is Down Syndrome, the thought of how many little ones in the world need our love and help, or that your heart has been touched with the desire to be the safe place for a child who has been abandoned with Down Syndrome... if you just hold the hand of your Heavenly Papa with the same childlike trust that my granddaughter holds mine, he will lead you safely on the journey.  He knows where the path leads.  He is trustworthy...

"Papa"