dear Baby.

dear Baby,

if i do nothing else in the time i'll get to be your mommy, i sincerely hope that i will teach you to not be a brat.  because brattiness is really obnoxious, especially on college students, and i hope that seeing me doing what i do every day and seeing your daddy doing what he does every day and seeing how we really, legitimately try to do what's right for our students will help you understand that being a sniveling, snippy jerkface doesn't get you any farther in life.

you know, this will of course intersect with things like teaching you how to be a decent person who loves and serves God, other people, and knows how to treat those in the world. i'll also try to teach you about football and baking and how to be a pop cultural sponge because sometimes those things will win you a really slammin' spouse (it worked for me), but mainly i'll just try to teach you how to be you.

and how to be a NICE you.  because even though the world will tell you that it's not true, kindness goes a long way in this world. it makes the difference between dismissing someone and building a lifelong friendship. a smile can make the difference in a stranger's day--and offering it can make all the difference in yours.  thinking the good about people can make them feel like you're a safe place to be, and that can lead to trust, and to be a trustworthy person in a world full of shifting definitions of "honest" is a treasure.  and, on a much deeper level, learning how to be the best you will make life a lot easier. it'll be hard, sometimes, to figure out how to be that best you, but when you figure parts of it out, it just feels right.

i started this little bloggy letter to you in response to a student being unnecessarily jerky to me and me reacting to it, feeling like sometimes it doesn't matter what i do, but then it became something real. and i realized that, you know, doing your best every day is an awesome lesson and legacy to leave someone, even someone as perfect and small and fragile and malleable as you.  so, instead of giving up, i'll go try to do my best some more because that's what i would tell you to do.

but i might give you a cookie first and tell you that sometimes people are mean, but that's okay, because we don't have to be.  because all of those things are true.  so we won't be mean.  and we won't give up. we'll just be grateful for the opportunity to learn from a situation, eat a cookie, and then do the best we can do. 

keep growing, Baby, and as soon as you have ears to hear, i'll start just telling you these things instead of writing them down.

(but i might write them down too--there's so much to say!--and if i told you all of it now, you'd already be rolling your eyes by the time i met you.)

i can't wait to meet you. i have a feeling you are going to be one heck of an awesome kid. 

love,
your worn-out but excited mom.