Facing Facts

When I posted on Friday about living a simpler life, I also had to come to grips with a few things. I am having a yard sale this week with a couple friends from church, and frankly, I don't have a ton to sell. We had a yard sale last June, too, and we really got rid of some stuff. So this time around, I feel like I have little things here and there, but not a whole lot to purge from the ol' parsonage.

After talking to my friend Angie, who is getting rid of all of her son's baby clothes up to his current size, my mind wandered to the seven bulging totes of clothes I have in an upstairs closet. All Abigail's...every outfit she ever wore from birth until now. I have saved every outfit until this point, thinking that if we have another girl someday, I will need all of those clothes. But then I realized that I could safely sell or give away about half of what she has in each size, and still have plenty of outfits left over for this girl we don't know we will have.

Then there is the issue of Abigail's crib (which I am not selling). We had kept her in her crib for a time longer than most kids stay in theirs. Her personality has always been pretty docile, and she's never been a climber except to jump off the arm of the couch occasionally. I don't think it ever occurred to her to try to climb in or out of her crib. A friend gave us her daughter's toddler bed about a year ago, and it had been sitting upstairs, waiting patiently for big girl use. Abigail knew it was there, and would ask us sometimes when she would get to sleep in her big girl bed. We would usually say vaguely, "Oh, soon." Or we would give her criteria to follow on what a big girl is and could she really handle it? After some time, I realized that we were keeping her in her crib much more for our comfort than for hers. Life's pretty easy when they are confined through the night, so why rush it?

Still, another thought crossed my mind. What if I was keeping her in her crib so I wouldn't have to deal with a long period of it's emptiness? If the crib is occupied, I don't have to think about the baby that I thought would have been there by now. If it is sitting empty upstairs, as her toddler bed was, then I have to face the facts that we aren't ready to fill it yet.

In a couple of weeks, I will reach what would have been my second due date for a baby who is not coming. My first was last October, and now in the spring. I need to realize that there are some things that I need to face, like it or not. It is okay for me to condense down seven totes of baby girl clothes. I don't want to do it, but I think I need to. And we made the transition last week to Abigail's toddler bed, and she has handled it perfectly. She was so excited, so ready. I don't want to hold her back from moving to a new stage just because our family is not. I just need to deal with the empty crib, and wait for God to fill it.