To All The Babies

My name is Josiah, and I'm 16 weeks old. This is me...

My Cheeky Grin

My mummy is trying to have, and I quote "just 5 minutes without a child needing me for something". So I am letting her have a few minutes sit down as she looks a bit frazzled this morning and she says she has a "million things to do".

The reason for hi-jacking my mummy's blog page is that I have mummy and daddy wrapped around my little finger. So I thought I'd share some of my tips with all my fellow baba friends as I seem to be doing pretty well at the moment.


I've well and truly exhausted my mummy, by waking her up every 2 or 3 hours in the night. She says this is not long enough for her to feel human (although she looks quite human to me....big people are just plain weird sometimes), but I just love her yummy milk. I gave mummy a 5hr sleep once, and she said it was amazing. I will do it again soon, just not yet. I think 3 hours is a long time. I feel very hungry after 3 hours. I do sometimes wake her after 2 hours though when I'm just a little hungry. You've got to keep them on their toes you know.  Besides, I love my milk and it makes me grow lots. Although that's another thing Mummy is always complaining about...that I'm growing too quick. She's a crackpot.

But she is fab because she lets me have yummy booby milk whenever I want, night and day, and because I kept growing so fast I was quite quickly too big for that horrid bed that looked like the basket the furry purring animal sleeps in; now I sleep with mummy and she holds my hand all night which I love. I am annoying daddy a lot because he says he misses cuddling up to mummy at night. Sorry daddy, but mummy seems to like cuddling me more than you!!

She also gives such lovely cuddles when I have my food that I often fall asleep there and mummy likes it sometimes because she gets daddy to do the jobs she doesn't want to by telling him "he's asleep now, I daren't wake him" because I do wake up when she sneakily tries to pass me carefully to daddy's arms or to the big cushion I sometimes sleep on for her. She's very crafty, as she sometimes manages to move me whilst I'm so deeply asleep, I haven't noticed. You need to be aware of these sneaky measures. A good way to know is to hold on to your mummy's finger whilst you feed so that if you fall asleep when she carefully releases your hand, you will be roused from sleep and you can hold on tighter, let out a little whimper and she'll let you stay there longer.

My big sister is crazy! I think she's done a lot of the ground work already on mummy because I hardly ever have to go in the pram. Mummy carries me around in the sling all the time. She even made daddy say a naughty word when she told him how much she'd spent on a really pretty new one. Mummy said to "watch your language" and he just looked like he'd been hit by a train when mummy then told him she had 5 wraps/slings.
Anyway, back to my crazy sister....I love watching her play and I love it when she plays with me, but mummy is always telling her to "be gentle'. I think mummy is over protective. I do sometimes get a bit annoyed with the hundreds of kisses she gives me, as I get loads from mummy and daddy too and my sister also takes my toys off me. I really like playing with the toys mummy puts out for me, but my pesky sister keeps taking them away and telling me they're  her toys. I have a suspicion that most of my stuff is hers. I am not fussed as she has some really nice stuff even though mummy says its all pink and girly. I'm really not bothered with what colour things are as long as they're fun. And mummy keeps telling her that when I'm bigger I will take all her toys off her like she's doing now to me. I'm going to remember that and take it as permission to do so once I can get these arm things to do what I want them to.

Oh, and I must tell you what happened this morning when I woke for milk. I woke after my usual 3 hours at 2am. Then when I woke less than 3hrs after the end of that feed, mummy tried to get me back sleep. I was not having any of that so I woke daddy (well, he is usually fast asleep and I think he deserves to be awake too!) Anyway, I had huge fun at 5am this morning with daddy. Daddy took me away from mummy and we went downstairs to try and give me some of Mummy's milk. It was so funny I kept laughing at daddy as he tried top push that horrid teat in my mouth. I pushed it out, he tried again. I went on like that for ages!!!

He tried his best to get me to have the milk. He tried 2 different types of bottles, we went in 3 different rooms, he walked around, put me in my bouncer and even my car seat. I took 2 little sucks and he got so so excited. He was on his phone asking someone called Google how to get a baby to take a bottle. He's a funny dude!!
Needless to say, as hungry as I was I kept refusing and eventually he took me upstairs to mummy. I heard him say to mummy that he did his best and tried for nearly 2hrs. He was funny when he was asking me to give mummy a "break". Anyway, I've had my booby milk and my sister woke me up when I was falling asleep on mummy so I gave mummy my magic grin to make her feel better as she looks a bit grumpy (see picture above. You must master a magic grin in order to get what you want!)

Mummy hasn't really had her few minutes to herself as my sister has been bugging her, and mummy is currently being asked to kiss my sister's feet better as she keeps taking her slippers off and has now hurt her toe. Mummy says her feet smell so is not kissing them. Mummy's trying to get us all ready, prepare tea for tonight and make some soup for my poorly great grandparents which we are apparently going to visit later (daddy told me he is relieved he is painting the downstairs loo today....whatever that means??). And she's looking like she does just before she tells my sister that she's having "2 mins and a cuppa" in that strange frenzied tone of voice when she tells my sister to just play on her own for a couple of minutes. So I had better go and make sure mummy is ok and cuddle her. Only problem is, I need to cry to get her to stop and cuddle me when she's so busy....oh well, needs must!!

Selah

In our church at the moment, we've had a month of teachings on the theme of "Selah".  I've yet to listen to all the preaches on this subject from the last month due to time (slaps my own wrist for making an excuse! but kids are ridiculously time consuming!!) but I have been enthralled with the snippets I've heard. So much so, that I've resurrected my blog to write about my own thoughts on the matter.

So, SELAH.
My preferred Bible version is the Amplified, which kindly gives a bit of an explanation to this strange word. It says "pause, and calmly think of that" when the word Selah is used. 

The word itself somehow makes me breathe out in a kind of cleansing, calming way just by saying it. It's a word that once I've said it, makes me stop before I say another word. It is calming just by pronouncing it. I like it.

Selah is mainly used in the Psalms, and a couple of times in Habakkuk (where the section is a prayer possibly set to music). It is, in some translations, not written as Selah, but rather "interlude". As the psalms were often sung to music, some seem to think that the interlude refers to an interlude in the song. This may well be. The definition of Selah is suspension (perhaps of music). But the root of the word is to weigh, value; to hang up. If God is telling us to weigh up something, to take an interlude and value something, then I think we should take heed.

Many times in this fast paced world, we hear or read something and we don't even remember it hours later. We suffer from information overload  - we're bombarded by images, adverts, information, status updates from people we don't see very often and perhaps don't even know! We get updates on news headlines, weather forecasts, celebrity tweets downloaded straight to our phones. Our brains are constantly being bombarded by pieces of useless information. Pictures of places, people, people's children, people's meals.....we're all guilty of either posting these things, or taking the time to look at them. And I'm not saying we shouldn't be part of an online community and share tidbits of our lives with people who we might otherwise not connect with.  But all this has an impact on us and on what we retain and take into our spirits. When I've sat and read the news online, then checked my facebook page, caught up on my twitter feed and watched half an hour of tv in the evening, I can look back and not actually remember a single article I read in the news. I can read a couple of chapters of the Word in the evening before bed, and when I come to continue the next night, I sometimes have to look back at what I read the previous night, as I can't remember. Anyone with me??? Surely I'm not the only one?!

So is it any wonder that God needs us to stop every now and again? Not just to stop, but to weigh up and think about what we've read.

But I have to say, I like the way the amplified Bible puts it - pause and calmly think. There's a world of difference between calmly thinking and just thinking. Have you ever had a conversation with your boss about something, then gone home that evening and thought about it..."that wasn't actually my fault. If so-and-so had done their job right, that wouldn't have happened". It could be any kind of situation. Perhaps a disagreement with your friend/spouse etc. Or any kind of confrontation; perhaps with a company you've placed a complaint with..."If only I'd have said this or used that example". You think about a situation and you think of things you wish you'd said, or you think about what happened and you feel a bit het-up inside about what someone said or did, or what you should have said and done at the time. Often we build things up in our minds and we get very subjective, rather than objectively looking at something.
That's not thinking calmly. That's not giving value and weighing up the words that were said to us. We need to give value to the words that God gives to us. We need to give weight to them. I used to think of Selah as meditating on God's Word, but I think it's different because the Strongs definition of meditate actually describes it as murmuring or muttering. In other words, to actually speak out God's word when we meditate. Whereas Selah is to suspend yourself and your mouth, and to think. 

What's also struck me when thinking about the whole theme of Selah is why it appears mainly in the book of Psalms. The Psalms are songs of praise to God. Some are not all happy, lovely praise songs - we see a lot of David's struggles in the Psalms too. Now praise and worship is powerful. It's a weapon in our spiritual armory that we should use. The reason it's so important is possibly because Lucifer was the archangel of praise. His function was to praise God. He probably produced the most beautiful music and songs of praise that we could not even imagine. But in his fallen state, he manipulates music and hates it when we praise. 

So why is God telling us to have an interlude in praise? Why is God telling us to stop and think? Perhaps, because we can go through the motions? Perhaps because we need to praise then take an interlude to think about what we are praising for;Who we are praising. Because sometimes it's good to be calm and let our mouths take a break, think about things in a calm manner and think about the awesome God we serve and that He will always be worthy of our praise and that He will never let us down. Maybe because during a time of praise and worship we're at our most receptive to God's guidance and if we stop, close our mouths we might learn something? I don't know. I just know that when God tells us to do something some 74 times, then we need to do it! Selah......