How could I be grumpy with a baby in distress and feel OK about it?
It was especially hard for me the year after our third child, Matthew, was born. We had
two preschool energizer bunnies and a new baby for me to keep up with during the day,
and my husband was frequently gone nights, traveling out of town with his work.
Even when Dennis was in town, we felt I should be the one to get up with the little ones
at night since he had to get to work in the morning. While I, theoretically, could sleep in.
We didn’t realize that an undiagnosed thyroid condition added to my tiredness.
Caring for Babies: Overcoming Sleep Deprivation with Gratitude
How could I hear that little wail, push my protesting body out of bed, and come up with the loving patience I needed to comfort my child?
First, a bachelor writer helped me.
C.S. Lewis advised his readers to be grateful to Jesus during everyday challenges. With his wisdom, I learned to pray when I heard that little wail: “Thank You, Jesus, for dying
on the cross to save me.”
“My little bit of suffering at getting up right now is nothing compared to what You did for me. Thank You for suffering for my sake.”
And then there were the nights – so many of them! – when the baby was sick and kept waking over and over.
That was when my mother helped me.
“‘All to Jesus, I Surrender’ makes a good lullaby,” she told me.
So I learned to settle down in the rocking chair with the baby and begin to surrender:
“Jesus, I don’t get many opportunities to praise you at 2 in the morning,” I’d say. “So, I’m
going to take this as my opportunity.”
Then I would sing that old familiar hymn:
All to Jesus I surrender (All? Even my sleep? Yes, Lord, even my sleep)
All to Him I freely give;
I will ever love and trust Him,
In His presence daily live.
Refrain: I surrender all, I surrender all;
All to Thee, my blessed Savior,
I surrender all.
All to Jesus I surrender,
Make me, Savior, wholly Thine;
Let me feel the Holy Spirit,
Truly know that Thou art mine.
All to Jesus I surrender,
Lord, I give myself to Thee;
Fill me with Thy love and power,
Let Thy blessing fall on me.
After I sang the surrender song, I’d begin singing praise songs to the Lord.
Over and over, time after time, the presence of God would fill the room.
I lost track of time. My fussy baby stopped fussing and fell dead asleep in my arms. But
I’d keep singing. It was so good to be in the presence of the Lord. To know His peace in
my chaos.
Then finally, sleepiness would overwhelm peace.
I put the baby back to bed, slipped into my own bed, and then – no longer irritated, no
longer upset, but still tired – I drifted off to sleep.
It happened many times, thanks to a song.
Here’s a story/journal prompt for you:
Is there a song that calms and speaks to you? When? Why?
Or maybe there is something that bugs you, something that happens over and over that
troubles you. Is this something you need to surrender to Jesus? Would the words to this
song help you think through that hurt, habit or hang-up?
Try writing and reflecting on it in a journal or notebook. It might be useful to include
the date, turn it into prayer and come back to it one day.
(Note: Judson W. Van DeVenter is the author of “All to Jesus, I Surrender.” His hymn is
in the public domain.)
Children can create healthy, no-cook recipes for summer
Even when it’s hot, kids love to help out in the kitchen.
These snacks are great for teaching children kitchen skills and kitchen independence. They require no cooking, and they are easy enough for a 2-year-old or 3-year-old to help and 5-year-olds to manage most of the steps with assistance. Responsible older children can make them easily by themselves.
Toddlers need assistance, but it’s essential to let them help and learn when they want to do it. If you keep shooing them away while working in the kitchen, they absorb “Go Away” messages. And that often makes them resist learning to help when they are older. A 2-year-old or 3-year-old can learn safe-cutting skills if you teach them to cut something easy, like slicing banana rounds with a dinner knife.
That said, in these recipes, cutting with sharp knives and using an electric mixer are jobs only for adults and older children who have had a lot of practice under supervision and have proven themselves to be responsible.
The no-cook recipes
Graham Cracker Faces:Spread graham crackers with peanut butter and make funny faces on the crackers with raisins, chocolate chips, carrot curls, coconut, etc.
Apple or Banana Slice Delight: Spread apple and/or banana slices with softened cream cheese or peanut butter.
Ants on a Log:Cut celery in short lengths, spread the cupped side with peanut butter and add “ants” (raisins)
Fruit kabobs: Gather and prepare an assortment of fruit and place each kind in a bowl – pineapple chunks (cut fresh or from a can, drained), cantaloupe or honeydew melon balls or chunks, sliced bananas, and washed grapes with the stems pulled off. Push one piece of each kind of fruit onto a bamboo skewer. Repeat your pattern until the skewer is full.
Toothpick treat: No bamboo skewers? Arrange the fruit on a plate and let kids eat it with toothpicks. Add chunks of cheese, pieces of cooked cold meat, or sandwiches cut up in one-inch squares to make this a whole, balanced meal. Toothpick meals are fun for kids to prepare and eat as a special treat. Somehow, spearing food with toothpicks makes ordinary food special.
Cereal balls:In a large bowl, thoroughly mix ½ cup peanut butter, 1/3 cup honey, ½ cup flaked coconut, ½ cup of your children’s favorite cereal, & any popular extras you have on hand, like raisins or banana chips. Pour another 1 ½ cups of your children’s favorite cereal into a second large bowl. Shape spoonfuls of the first mixture into balls and roll them in the cereal in the second bowl. Chill and eat.
Homemade popsicles:Pour fruit juice into paper cups. Place a clean plastic spoon into each cup for a popsicle holder. The spoon will freeze at an angle, but that just gives juice popsicles a little more character. Freeze. When the popsicle is frozen, tear off the paper, or if you want to recycle the cup, run it under warm water and gently pull it on the spoon.
Let your children experiment by combining juices—cranberry and orange are tasty combinations, for example. You can also try other things, such as chocolate milk-flavored yogurt. A great yogurt combination is 2 cups plain yogurt, a 6-oz. can of undiluted frozen orange juice, and 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Even plain water works in a pinch. It makes a true icicle and cools you off marvelously when the temperature soars.
Frozen yogurt pie: In a mixer, whip together two 8-oz. cartons of yogurt and one 8-oz. carton of Cool Whip.™ Pour into a prepared graham cracker crust and freeze until set. This is especially tasty when made with lemon or berry-flavored yogurt. You can spoon the yogurt and Cool Whip™ mixture into paper cups for lusciously rich popsicles instead of making this recipe into a pie.
Personalized trail mix:Visit a natural food store or the natural food department at a supermarket to buy your ingredients: nuts, dried fruit (raisins, apricots, dates, apples), granola or muesli, and carob or chocolate chips. Mix everything in a big bowl and spoon it into sandwich bags. Take it along on a hike or set it out for a snack. Somehow, trail mix that kids make themselves tastes better to them than what you buy for them already mixed in the store.
Frozen bananas:Slice bananas in half and insert ice cream sticks in the cut ends. Freeze on a cookie sheet or pan and store in ziplock bags. When you want to eat them, allow the bananas to thaw slightly, and dip them into different toppings, such as peanut butter, finely chopped nuts, flavored yogurt, coconut, or caramel ice cream topping.
Frozen banana drink:Peel a banana, wrap it in plastic, and freeze it. Blend the frozen banana with ½ cup half-and-half, 2 tablespoons honey, and 1 teaspoon vanilla in an electric blender until smooth.
Missing the blessing: Father and Son Reconciliation
Probably all fathers fail their children to some degree. Claude Powers failed his child, then backed up and tried to make up for it.
Claude started out as a good father. But when his own father and brother died a couple years apart in the late 1950s, he started drinking heavily.
Then the bottle took over.
And of course, that affected his son Dennis. Because Dennis, like all children, needed his father to weave three consistent messages of unconditional acceptance into the fabric of his life:
To me you are special.
No matter what, I love you.
You’re part of me; we belong together.
Father and Son: When Dennis was about 12
When he was at that age, his dad became a sneaky bottle-hider who told lies, wasted the family income in bars and dumped his farming responsibilities on his son.
So instead of sending his son a father’s reassuring messages of faithful love and acceptance, Claude sent Dennis the message of the alcoholic:
“Alcohol is more important than you are. You will always be relatively unimportant.”
Dennis stifled the pain, avoided his dad, and proved to his small community that he was important after all. He did exceptionally well in school, collecting enough high school credits to leave for the university one year early.
In college he kept in touch with his parents and made sure the family relationship appeared fine to relatives and neighbors. In reality, he buried his anger and walled himself off emotionally from his dad.
God’s Blessings: Fathers and sons can reconcile.
A dozen years after Claude’s alcoholism took serious hold, Dennis’s parents discovered Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon, and Claude started sobering up through AA’s 12-Step Program.
At about that same time Dennis began attending church and hearing about forgiveness.
Since the relationship was not damaged overnight, healing did not occur overnight.
Claude worked on his end of the problem by giving up alcohol and making amends as best as he could.
Dennis worked out his part by accepting his father’s efforts and struggling through the process of forgiveness.
But in the end, the really deep healing occurred nearly twenty years later.
And curiously, the only part Claude played in that final act of the drama was to grow old and lose his mind.
Claude became a victim of Alzheimer’s disease. At first, he merely grew forgetful. Then, as his brain cells died in patches, he lost his smile, his charm, his good judgment, and his table manners.
He forgot how to dress, how to shave, how to bathe.
About the time he forgot how to talk, he lost control of his body and had to wear diapers.
Then, every night, Dennis would walk over to his parents' mobile home, lead his 80-year-old father into the bathroom, and peel off his diaper.
Then he toileted him, undressed him, and bathed him.
In this process, somehow, Dennis found his healing.
When the father became like a child, the child became his own father’s father.
For Dennis, forgiveness became complete through the work of his own hands as he lived out the messages of blessing he had needed so much as a teen to receive from his father:
To me you are special.
No matter what, I love you.
You’re part of me; we belong together.
A prayer for today
Dear Heavenly Father, I need your blessing, too. As I read the Bible, father me. Help me hear your message of love, acceptance and grace for me. Amen.
I’ve always loved my sleep. And once I drifted off, I wanted to stay drifted off. I hated being woken up from sound sleep.
But then I began having babies. Who got sick at night. Who fussed. Who needed comfort at inconvenient times.
Being grumpy only made the situation worse, and anyway…
How could I be grumpy with a baby in distress and feel OK about it?
It was especially hard for me the year after our third child, Matthew, was born. We had
two preschool energizer bunnies and a new baby for me to keep up with during the day,
and my husband was frequently gone nights, traveling out of town with his work.
Even when Dennis was in town, we felt I should be the one to get up with the little ones
at night since he had to get to work in the morning. While I, theoretically, could sleep in.
We didn’t realize that an undiagnosed thyroid condition added to my tiredness.
Caring for Babies: Overcoming Sleep Deprivation with Gratitude
How could I hear that little wail, push my protesting body out of bed, and come up with the loving patience I needed to comfort my child?
First, a bachelor writer helped me.
C.S. Lewis advised his readers to be grateful to Jesus during everyday challenges. With his wisdom, I learned to pray when I heard that little wail: “Thank You, Jesus, for dying
on the cross to save me.”
“My little bit of suffering at getting up right now is nothing compared to what You did for me. Thank You for suffering for my sake.”
And then there were the nights – so many of them! – when the baby was sick and kept waking over and over.
That was when my mother helped me.
“‘All to Jesus, I Surrender’ makes a good lullaby,” she told me.
So I learned to settle down in the rocking chair with the baby and begin to surrender:
“Jesus, I don’t get many opportunities to praise you at 2 in the morning,” I’d say. “So, I’m
going to take this as my opportunity.”
Then I would sing that old familiar hymn:
All to Jesus I surrender (All? Even my sleep? Yes, Lord, even my sleep)
All to Him I freely give;
I will ever love and trust Him,
In His presence daily live.
Refrain: I surrender all, I surrender all;
All to Thee, my blessed Savior,
I surrender all.
All to Jesus I surrender,
Make me, Savior, wholly Thine;
Let me feel the Holy Spirit,
Truly know that Thou art mine.
All to Jesus I surrender,
Lord, I give myself to Thee;
Fill me with Thy love and power,
Let Thy blessing fall on me.
After I sang the surrender song, I’d begin singing praise songs to the Lord.
Over and over, time after time, the presence of God would fill the room.
I lost track of time. My fussy baby stopped fussing and fell dead asleep in my arms. But
I’d keep singing. It was so good to be in the presence of the Lord. To know His peace in
my chaos.
Then finally, sleepiness would overwhelm peace.
I put the baby back to bed, slipped into my own bed, and then – no longer irritated, no
longer upset, but still tired – I drifted off to sleep.
It happened many times, thanks to a song.
Here’s a story/journal prompt for you:
Is there a song that calms and speaks to you? When? Why?
Or maybe there is something that bugs you, something that happens over and over that
troubles you. Is this something you need to surrender to Jesus? Would the words to this
song help you think through that hurt, habit or hang-up?
Try writing and reflecting on it in a journal or notebook. It might be useful to include
the date, turn it into prayer and come back to it one day.
(Note: Judson W. Van DeVenter is the author of “All to Jesus, I Surrender.” His hymn is
in the public domain.)
© 2019 Becky Cerling Powers, updated 2024
Reprint with attribution only: https://beckypowers.com
For more parenting insights from Becky Cerling Powers see her blog at
www.beckypowers.com and her parenting book Sticky Fingers, Sticky Minds: quick
reads for helping kids thrive in the Bookstore