Sophie & I attempting to climb to Waikere Falls. She’s a trouper but she wanted to examine every rock on the way so we never quite made it there.

Sophie and I have been having great fun!

As missionaries, I forsee ourselves moving from place to place a lot. For example, in 2 months or so, we’ll be off to another mission location as part of the DTS. This moving around can be quite disturbing to a little child. I was just talking to someone about how Sophie doesn’t really like to say goodbye or sometimes even hello. I know that kids go thru that phase but I think that Sophie’s case goes a bit deeper than that. I think she still grieves that she lost some of her friends from the last school and she’s afraid of saying bye. The person whom I spoke too also shared that her son went through the same thing at that age while living on the base. That confirms what I’ve been feeling all this while.

So, what I’ve been doing is, spending a lot of time with Sophie. Whenever I can, I try to spend extended time with her. When we arrived in this new home, I just sensed the Lord telling me to do so. Over here, I’m not really a stay home mum anymore. Sophie goes to childcare in the mornings till almost 1pm. We have lunch as a community and then she goes for a nap till 3.30pm. By then I’m normally home and done with the day. So in reality, she’s only with me from 3.30pm onwards. That’s not a lot of time compared to before we started on this journey!

So, now, we spend sometimes more than an hour before bedtime just hanging out. She’s at such a great age to just hang out. My little 2 year old teenager. We talk about different things. We play masak masak (cooking/toys). We read. We talk about the day. I even wait for her to sleep before I left the room so that she knows I’m there. I did this for the past three weeks since we got here and finally weaned her off needing me to be there until she slept. I can tell she really enjoys that time and is more willing to go to bed now. I guess going to bed meant she was left on her own again and she hates that. But spending time with her really helped to make her feel secure and rested.

This I believe is so important when a child’s environment changes so much over short periods of time. She really needs us to be the constant. Taking time to be with her and assure her that people and places might change but we are the ones she can trust and hang onto. It is so important because a child’s first ability to trust God comes from being able to trust her parents.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 9th, 2009 at 3:54 am and is filed under Baby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.