Breakfast and Bath Time...

It takes a village...to change a diaper! LOL

As a mother of a daughter and a son, I am about to share with you some *extremely* (not) profound insight:

Boys and girls are SO different!

I know, I know, you are marveling at my depth as a mother;-)  In all seriousness though, sometimes I'm so baffled at how different having a son is from having a daughter.  My prime example of that today being this:  Boys are SO messy!  Ready for some examples?  OK: top 5 reasons how boys are messier than girls:

Number 5:
Boys spend their first few days of life practicing their evangelism skills through baptizing you.  It literally took me weeks to wise up to combating this!

If smiles could SMELL...;-)

Number 4:

Boys give a whole new meaning to the term "blowout."  The amount of blow-out diapers we often change in one week could be compared to the all time TOTAL of blowout diapers Lucy ever had!

Number 3:

Proud of his shpae-sorter dumping skills:)

He crawled with this in tow on Sunday morning!

Boys seem capable of destroying a tidy room in a matter of seconds!  I realize Lucy probably isn't the norm, but she just doesn't really enjoy playing with toys a whole lot.  Gabriel, on the other hand, LOVES to play with toys!  It really doesn't matter what kind--he loves them all!  He typically has very specific ways he plays with certain toys though.  I was just telling DH tonight about how funny it is to play with his shape sorter with him, because he just cannot handle it when all of the shapes are inside of their box--the moment you put them inside, he grabs the toy and dumps them all out.  He has also recently started dragging his toys across the room--he will often start with several and crawl along with them, dumping them off along his way to the other part of the house.  So, by the time he's gone from the living room to the kitchen, he has a nice little Hansel and Gretal-esque trail behind him!


Number 2:
Boys, by nature, seem to be born with a desire to figure out how things work...and then rip them mercilessly to shreds!  LOL:)  Being the germaphobe that I am, I often bring those disposable stick-on plastic placemats with us to restaurants.  It just makes me feel better about him grabbing food off of the table.  You'd think my son was some sort of ravenous beast though the way he takes his two teeth and sweet little hands and literally attacks that placemat like it's some sort of evil foe!  And that poor disposable bib that he was sporting at lunch today only lasted halfway through the meal begore he literally ripped off one entire side!  (Those bibs have an absorbable backing that is VERY difficult to tear, by the way!)

And finally, the Number 1 reason boys are messier than girls:
We can't forget to state the obvious: mealtime!  I can wipe Gabriel's face off after every single bite and cover him with a sturdy bib, and he still somehow ends up with food all over his face, in his hair, and on his clothes!  He lately has gotten to where he wants to grab the spoon from us when we are feeding him, flinging food across the highchair and spreading it all over his face.  He also likes to stick his fingers in his mouth after he's taken a bite and pull his food out like he's creating some sort of home-made facial!  LOL:)  No, it's not quite the typical "spaghetti shot" you see, where marinara sauce has been spread out across the child's entire body as if they were treating themselves as a canvas, but I think Gabriel knows his momma's limits;-)

So, case in point: boys are messy!  But can I let you in on a little secret?

I LOVE it!

I love sitting in the floor making silly car sounds and explosion noises as blocks come crashing out of their box.  I love watching my Linus-like boy happily roam through the house with his toys.  And I love cleaning that sweet, beautiful face off...and then showering it with kisses, of course!  And even the blowout diapers have been known to bring a smile to my face--in a situation like that when there's no changing table and a diaper has literally exploded to every surrounding area, all you can do is laugh about it and move on...and remember that messes are cleanable, and this particular baby boy LOVES bath time!

Since becoming mobile, there are a few key places Gabriel is constantly trying to roam off to: Annabelle's bed, Sissy's room, and the bathroom.  Literally, the moment he hears the bath tub faucet turn on, he RACES towards the bathroom.  Baby boy LOVES bath time!  Every day is almost like a front row seat at the Shamu show at Sea World, because Gabriel loves to kick and splash the water everywhere!  I snapped these shots of him all snuggled up inside of his hooded towel after his bath this morning--how precious is my little froggy boy?!

It's kind of funny...my Bible reading today was in Leviticus, specifically the passage where the Lord gives instructions on what to do with someone who has leprosy and how a person was deemed as "clean" or "unclean."  If they were labeled as the latter, they had to live in solitude, and anytime they were around people they would have to proclaim, "Unclean!  Unclean!"  I'll be honest, when I was reading through the passage this morning, I was having a difficult time plowing through it, because all of the detailed instructions for all of these laws can get pretty boring to read.  And I also found myself thinking, "This is so mean!  Why would God want those people to live in solitude?" But as I thought about my messy little boy at breakfast time this morning, and then breathed in his freshly shampooed hair after bath time (seriously--there's nothing that smells sweeter than a baby's head after their bath!), I began to reflect on that passage of Scripture I had read this morning.  What a tremendous gift we have been given that Jesus truly paid our debt, once and for ALL for our sins, by dying on the cross.  Our God is so holy that He cannot be in the presence of sin, yet He still desired to be close to His children, so He created all of those laws so that His people could draw near to Him...but when His son came to die for us, that took away the need for all of that.  We no longer have to go through life shouting, "Unclean!  Unclean!" for through the blood of Jesus, we have been made clean and whole!

So as I think of my little boy's breakfast sessions and bath time scents, I smile at how my Jesus loves me with all of my messes, and how He desires to make me into something new, beautiful, and fragrant...

Psalm 51:10-12
"Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.  Cast me not away from thy presence, O Lord, and take not thy Holy Spirit from me.  Restore unto me the joy of my salvation, and renew a right spirit within me."