Our Gift

My little (or not so little) Abby, my oldest, is a gift, and she’s growing up so fast. She is so much the adult, and yet not quite four. She was one of the girlfriends at lunch the other day, with my mom and her friend Vickie, joining the conversation as one of us, or rather, trying. She would stop one of us, hands straight up in front of her, face loaded with grown-up expression, and say, “Wait. That’s not all the whole story.” Half the time, she doesn’t make sense when she’s joining our “adult” conversations, but she’s too cute to stop. It tickles us to watch and listen to this four-going-on-twenty-four-year-old.

She’s so much like her daddy’s side of the family. Her pofile is the spitting image of her grandma as a child. That was the first thing I said about her when I came out of the anesthesia after my C-section, “She looks like Karla.” To this day she does, although her golden blonde hair and steel blue eyes come from my grandpa.

She has always been too big for her age. She was born big, weighing nine and a half pounds at birth. From that point on, she’s been nothing but the 90th percentile or above in her height, weight, and head circumference – a Mary Poppins baby, they call it, practically perfect in every way. Even now she’s not quite four, and everyone thinks she’s going into first grade.

Her size has lent itself to awkwardness. She is clumsy and doesn’t realize it. She takes after her auntie that way, Daddy’s sister. They called her “Cari Jo uh-oh” as a child because she took so many spills. Abby is her Aunt Cari that way. Band-Aids are an ever-present necessity in our house.

She takes after her daddy in liking puzzles. She loves to put puzzles together and has been putting them together since a little over two. She is also busy like her daddy. She is always moving from activity to activity, and she moves the entire time she’s doing it. Busy child. And she has her daddy’s toes, poor thing.

I like to think she takes after both sides of our family when it comes to her reasoning skills. She solves problems all the time. If you have a problem, she can solve it. No kidding. When we went camping several weeks ago, she and my mom were in the campground alone, and night was falling. The cooler with all of the food needed to be lifted into the bear box before nightfall. My mom was frantically trying to lift it, to no avail. Abby said, “You could take stuff out of it first, Grandma.” This quality, however, can be a problem at times. She won’t give up on “no, we can’t do that because…” She will argue against the reasoning, figuring out how we can do it, even if you really didn’t want her to be doing it at all.


She is the most like me in that quality time is her love language. She wants to be with those she loves all the time, and she wants their undivided attention in every activity. “You want to play with me, Mama?” is a regular question she asks. Whatever she’s doing, she wants to do it with you, never by herself, even if it means altering what she’s doing so that she can do what you’re doing. When we leave, even if it’s to go to Bible study for an hour, she tears up and kisses us goodbye four or five times and makes her little sister follow suit. Then, as we pull out of the driveway, we watch her silent sobs as she waves goodbye to us from the window. You would think we were leaving for a year.

Though she takes after both of us, she is her own little person, and it’s both strange and wonderful to witness. She is the God-given gift we’ve been handed for a moment, a gift to treasure.