Yeah! It’s time for another Good Song Sunday!

As promised, I’ve included the lyrics for this song. It’s a newER one. We actually changed one line a couple weeks ago. So I guess it’s brand new in its current state, but not brand new in most every line and melody but one. Make sense?

Enjoy. Try sharing on Facebook and/or Twitter, it might feel really good.

You, My Love
I cry out to you for help
covered up in my self-doubt
My eyes are tired but cannot close
And I wonder if you’ve left me alone
Then I hear you sing, you sing, you sing

I will hold on to you when I’ve lost my way
I will hold on to you when I’m stuck in my shame
All of the Earth shakes
The thunder breaks to feel your touch
But your Kingdom is inside me
Oh how I delight in
You, my love

The bread I eat don’t satisfy
water I drink leaves me dry
I have no hurt you don’t know
Or won’t make into blessing, turning crimson into snow
And I hear you sing, you sing, you sing

You, My Love by Laura Elizabeth Thornton, Timothy Floyd Thornton, Aaron Strumpel copyright Bricklayer Music Publishing (ASCAP) 2010, registered with CCLI

So you might have noticed over there on the sidebar, a list of recommended things. I’m hoping to change those up every couple weeks or so, and I’m hoping to continue to do what I’m going to do today. Actually recommend them.

First things first: I should change the title of this post to What Got My Both My Babies Sleeping Through the Night.

I love all things Baby Whisperer! Before Ellie was born, my sister gave Secrets of the Baby Whisperer: How to Calm, Connect, and Communicate with Your Baby to me, saying that it was a book that actually took into account different baby temperaments in helping moms come up with good and healthy routines for babies and that it explains how to decipher a baby’s cues and determine what they need when they cry.

Well, she was right! Holy cow it is SO helpful! There is a section that explains the many temperaments of babies, along with a quiz you can take to find out which your baby leans towards. And then throughout the book Tracy (the author and I are on a first name basis, that’s how close we are) continues to specify different techniques you can use for each temperament in establishing a routine. And not only that, she has really practical tips and tricks to help baby sleep, without relying solely on crying-it-out. Unlike other books that preach somewhat the same “eat-awake-sleep” pattern, this book is one that I went back to time and time again thinking, “but how can I do that?” and then the answer would be right there in black and white!

And when Ellie and Emma would cry and I wouldn’t know what their cries meant, I would race back to the book and look at the chart of different baby cries. It didn’t tell me everything, because every baby is different, but it definitely gave me some ideas and some things to try.

For both my girls, who have very different personalities, this book was invaluable! Practical, step-by-step kinds of stuff was exactly what I needed as a new mommy who, with our house concerts and worship leading and the like, needed my babies to be on a somewhat predictable routine.

Secrets of The Baby Whisperer is a book that gives a great overview to The Baby Whisperer methodology, and you can find even more practical tips in The Baby Whisperer Solves All Your Problems: Sleeping, Feeding, and Behavior–Beyond the Basics from Infancy Through Toddlerhoodwhich is organized by common issues that arise in early parenthood: nighttime sleep, naps, early waking, potty training, weaning pacifiers, and more.

The other fantastic thing about The Baby Whisperer is the online forum. All the mommies that participate have the same Baby Whisperer (BW) outlook on things, and so the advice you get when you post a question is usually really good. Like everything, you have to weigh the answers you get with how you want to parent, but for the most part, I’ve had great luck with the forums. There are extensive articles on the forums, too, about sleep training and sleep patterns. There’s a forum on breast feeding, on toddler eating habits, and lots more. I spend hours on that thing.

Just writing about it gets me excited. That’s how much I love it.

Repent

It’s one of my new favorite words. It used to be one of those words that made me uneasy and uncomfortable, mostly because I didn’t know what it meant. Kind of like this next one:

Confess

Also a used-to-be-uncomfortable word. I’d hear it or read it in the Bible every once in a while, and I’d start to squirm a little bit. I think it made me feel uncomfortable because I didn’t want to let anyone–even God–in on the fact that I wasn’t perfect or that the plants in the garden of my soul needed any tending.

So I’d stick with the easy confessions. I’d stick with things like not helping the old lady across the street or taking a harsh tone with a friend.

But a little while ago, I read this verse:

Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord.  Acts 3:19

I hadn’t ever felt refreshed and rested in the depths of my spirit after confessing something to someone or to God. What was I not getting about confession and repentance that it didn’t seem to work for me?

As I spent some time talking this through with trusted friends and with the Father, I realized that I was thinking of confession and repentance all wrong.

I was thinking of confession and repentance as a burden, something that would show I wasn’t the awesome Christian I tried so hard to make myself into. But that’s thinking like a slave, not like a daughter. That’s thinking like someone who has something to prove, instead of like someone who is at rest in Christ.

It dawned on me that confession and repentance are much more fun than I initially thought they were; they are a gift of the Father that brings me closer to the fullness of who I am in Christ. These two words speak to the working out of my salvation that gets me living into the abundant life that Jesus promised.

So now I’m much more interested in confessing the big stuff. I catch myself telling the Lord: Bring it on. Bring on the roots of things. The vows and agreements I’ve made in my life that work against me and against others. The judgments I’ve made against myself, God, and others. The unforgiveness that may be lurking in my heart.

Make no mistake, he does bring it on. And sometimes I feel like that poor tree in Christmas Vacation that Clark Griswold and family had to pull up by the roots and strap to the roof of their station wagon. Totally exposed.

But then I confess. I repent. I stop the reaping of that thing in my life. And then, because it’s all in the light now, the miracle happens. Those roots get chopped up and thrown in the chipper, and my spirit feels lighter, and, you guessed it, so refreshed and full of life.

So now repentance and confession are two of my favorite things to do–because when I confess and repent, I get freer and freer to be the woman God created me to be in Christ. My relationships are stronger. I am way more fun to be around. I can hear the Lord clearer. Everything is better.

Okay, so I know it’s not Sunday. It’s Monday. But here I am, and we’ll just have Good Song Sunday on Monday this week.

Caution: What you are about to see reveals my chaos. I probably should have done it again, when the kids are in bed, when the house is cleaned up, when I have some make-up on. But I think once you watch, you’ll see why I chose not to. My kids are just too cute.

So here’s Reckless. It’s another new one, and I wrote it for little Emma Rose.

As always, if you are a songwriter or you love the songs of mommy friends of yours, please email me and let me know. laurie@peartreemommy.com  I’d love to feature some other mommy songwriters.

Reckless by Laura Elizabeth Thornton copyright Bricklayer Music Publishing (ASCAP) 2010, registered with CCLI

When I was in jr. high and high school, my youth group would charter a bus to go to camp. It was a long drive from Vegas to Cali, and I was obsessed with getting the best seat for the drive. I didn’t know what the best seat was, mind you; I didn’t have a criteria. I would just run, be the first on, and go with my first instinct.  My party spirit –the one that doesn’t like to take her time or think things through–would take over and I would get in a frenzy about getting to the “best” spot first.

I’d plant myself in the back, or wherever my party-spirit dictated, and then I’d watch the others calmly, patiently, file in. Inevitably, kids I didn’t know would fill in around me, and my friends would find other places to sit. Quickly I’d realize that I’d acted too fast and that what I thought was the best spot was not the best spot, and I’d spend the bulk of the long drive trying to get to where I would’ve been all along had I just bided my time and walked patiently to the bus with my friends. Sometimes, if we had chartered two buses, I would end up on the wrong bus altogether!

The Lord reminded me of this yesterday as I was waiting for the lube guys at Walmart to give my car an oil change. Tim and I walked together through the store, talking some things over the way we do. We laughed as we thought about my little jr. high self running ahead of the crowd while my friends just hung back and enjoyed being together, trusting that the seat-picking process–which, to them, wasn’t as important as the mere fact that we were together and on our way to camp–would work itself out.

And I realized that sometimes I find myself in this same situation: rushing to find a seat on the bus before everything else falls into place. Then I end up stuck, trying to get myself to where I might’ve been in the first place if I would have exercised some patience and waited for the Lord’s timing to become clear.

I think I’m going to try to take on an attitude more like the attitude my friends had: hang back, wait for the right timing, and trust that eventually I’ll find myself in a better spot on the bus than I could have gotten into on my own.