Life With A Little Girl

Raising a little girl is....wonderful, precious, sweet, and well, just different from raising boys!  There are unique things about raising girls that seem so complex.  There are little intricacies of being a godly woman that seem so impossible to describe or even begin to teach.  Perhaps a great deal of the difficulty comes in at the fact that I do not see myself as a strong, godly woman.  I have not "arrived."  I am still learning.  God is still sanctifying me!  How can I somehow pass along what needs to be known to my daughter?  How do I teach her what she needs to know and protect her from making mistakes I've made (and make)?  Our culture screams against teaching girls to be what the Bible calls them to be.  Submission is almost a dirty word in the world.  There are so many things little Grace has yet to learn.  How to be meek and submissive, yet strong and have an independent mind.  How to be feminine and live a life of servanthood, yet not be a doormat.  How to live a life without fear, yet hunger for and cling to the love and protection a godly man will offer her.  How to know how to provide for and take care of a home, yet trust peacefully in the ability of her husband to do the providing.  It is a tall order and one I can only fathom facing with God at my side and long moments of prayer.  God teach me, that I might teach her!

On a funnier note, one thing I have learned about raising little girls is that things can be....well....a bit MESSY in the morning.

Wow!  That is some serious bed head!  Beautification in the morning is not a ritual reserved only for big girls.  No, it starts just as soon as the little girl grows enough hair to create a rather monstrous bird's nest during sleeping!  I think curly hair (which Gracie has) just compounds the whole bed head issue.  Taming something like this takes time!  A little girl's ability to be still and have an attention span starts at a tender age as they are put through the rigors of hair styling (and if their mommy lacks skills and is still learning, as I am, well...it takes even longer!).  I can say, it is a wonderful blessing God graces GIRLS with hair that requires styling and NOT little boys.  No way my boys could 1.) stand still that long or 2.) tolerate the tugging, pulling, pinching sensations of having your hair styled by someone who does not know what they are doing and is using itty bitty teeny weeny elastics that are about the size of my toddler's finger tip!  I should also note that sadly, the little girl's beautification process is not a once and done occurrence either.  No, hair is re-styled morning and post nap at minimum with a good chance of additional styling throughout the day, depending on the stability of the style and how well mommy successfully wrapped those minuscule elastics around the hair.  I have no idea how people survived without Pinterest or Google (that may explain a lot about why my hair looked rather similar to the picture above on a daily basis, even after styling, when I was a little girl).  My poor mother had a time trying to pin down my massively curly fly away hair when I was this age.  Holy frizz!  However, enter Pinterest and Google, and I am saved by the help of others...who, get this, actually KNOW what they are doing!  We've experimented some and found some styles that seem to survive even the nastiest of naps or wallow on the floor kind of days.  They do, however, produce even cooler bed head in the morning, if that is even possible!  We are learning, albeit slowly, but we are learning to tame the locks of Gracie!