I’m not really one to write a huge, long birthday post every year for each of my kiddos.  I hope that they know they are special and loved without that.  In fact as they get older I imagine they won’t always appreciate having the details of their lives and birthday bashes splashed across my blog, accessible to the world.  However, there are moments that I feel the celebration of their birth is really more about my unpacking where they’ve come from and where they are going.

Lanae is my third child.  In so many ways she fits the mold of “birth order”.  She’s a middle child!  I can see that she sometimes feels forgotten, ignored, unimportant.  She yearns to shine bright but I see the crushing of her little heart overshadowed by two big brothers and a baby sister.  I know she’ll be fine.  She’s resilient, beautiful, amazing, smart and host of other wonderful attributes.  But she’s also my sweet, sweet little girl.  I long to hold her close, protect her, tell her she will succeed, she is loved, she is worthwhile and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she hears me and believes me from now until her last breath.  But I see in her a niggling of doubt.  A constant pain of uncertainty, insecurity, if you will.  And I pray that she will overcome that.

You see she is the child I prayed I would get but never fully believed I would.  I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way to those who have faced issues of infertility or who have lost a child.  What I mean is that her arrival bestowed upon me the immense privilege of experiencing life with a daughter (and in fact, granted me the opportunity to experience it twice).  After the arrival of our two boys I pondered what life might look like in a houseful of boys.  My outlook shifted a bit as I tried to wrap my mind around that.  When I first found out I was expecting our third, I had in my mind that this little one may be the completion of our family.  James told me we would be finding out the gender because he knew he could survive three boys, but the possibility of four boys was more than he could fathom.  More importantly, he needed me to wrap my head around what my life would look like long before the child arrived.  He had no interest in a wife delivering a healthy, wonderful little boy only to be overcome with disappointment because he wasn’t a girl.

But, of course, God always knows the plan.  I sometimes wonder if he doesn’t look at us with a minor smirk and say, “if only they’d just trust me, they’d know I already have it all figured out”.  In this case, I’m sure He did.  When we found out Lanae was on her way, it opened the door to possibility.

131214_MHP_Davenport_029When I look at her now I see this stunning, little lady.  I can’t imagine how different my life would have been without her.  Sometimes I struggle to “get” her.  She’s intense!  She’s affectionate but standoffish.  She knows what she wants but sometimes struggles to go after it.  She’s so, SO precious.

My privilege in raising her is recognizing the ways she is herself.  I can pinpoint exactly who she looks like, oddly a total “mini-me” of her Uncle Cam, James’ youngest brother.  But I can’t pinpoint those obvious character traits that place her more in relation to my side or James’ side.  However, I am reminded through that, that she is her own person.  She’s exactly who God created her to be and while she may find along the way that she favours certain relations in her life, I think she’ll be a much happier, content individual when she settles into the fact that she is herself.  Perfectly made for a purpose at this time in history, in this family, as Lanae Daelyn Davenport!

HAPPY 8TH BIRTHDAY SWEET CHILD.  You are LOVED!!

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