Tummy Time

It is a miserable thing -- making Junior do tummy time each day.  On her best days, she starts out okay, lifting her head and looking around placidly.  But then, inevitably, it starts...

The legs start kicking.  Those cute little feet in fleece footed pajamas start moving furiously against the mat.

The crying begins.  All versions of it are painful:  the outright screaming (often accompanied by a red-faced appearance that we call "tomato head"), the general fussing, the plaintive and pitiful whimpering.  

She loses strength and is unable to lift her head, and instead just cries, and cries, and cries in agitation--fists all bunched up in a fury--into the floor.  

It is the saddest thing.  I hate doing it.

And so, for a time, we stopped doing it. We're supposed to do thirty minutes a day, but we did a lot less than that...and sometimes skipped it altogether.  But this past week, my brother and sister came to town to visit, and they impressed upon us the great importance of tummy time for Junior's physiological development...so now we're back to doing it.  And it stinks.  Seeing my little girl suffer her way through the three ten-minute segments we require daily is so difficult. The time can't pass quickly enough.  Even a minute feels like ten minutes.  

We try to make it more bearable by laying on the floor next to her, stroking her back, holding her clenched fists, encouraging her to keep going, telling her that we love her and are proud of her and are doing this for her good.  She doesn't really hear us most of the time because she is too busy crying.  And it makes me feel so sad on the inside.  Mr. Squire says it is heartbreaking to watch her, and I quite agree.

But we do it because it's good for her.  She can't understand that, but how I wish she did, so that she would know that we aren't being mean or harsh or unloving--but that the opposite is true: that we love her so much that we endure her suffering for her good.

It has dawned on me in these recent days that that must be how God feels towards us sometimes when we go through tough circumstances.  He knows we need to go through it, even if it hurts like no other.  We kick and scream and cry and we just don't understand why this is happening, or for what purpose.  It makes no sense to us; everything is a dead end, and it's just meaningless suffering.  

And yet He is there, down in the trenches with us, holding our hands, present with us in our suffering.  And not just watching over us, but encouraging us, reassuring us, loving us.  And we can't hear him amidst our screaming.  So He quietly suffers together with us, feeling pain and heartbreak as He watches us go through what He knows we must endure if we are to grow and thrive.