A True Blessing

I am feeling overwhelmingly blessed with our son!!  What a joy he is to my life!  I have often been told that three years of age can be a nightmare.  I am seeing the fruits of our labor every day and it just blesses my heart more than I can say.  Josiah is definitely not perfect...lets face it...NONE of us are!  Do we still discipline and train daily?  Of course...that is what parenting is!  We are called to raise our children for the Lord and I am so grateful that the Lord blessed us with him.  We have had times when we would go through stages that were tough, but we were consistent and disciplined with the way we felt the Lord was calling us to.  I can look back on the last few weeks of him being two and the first week of him being three and I remember feeling stressed and exhausted (physically, mentally and emotionally) with the constant discipline and teaching.  Well, I am glad to say it has paid off tremendously!  I am not stupid in thinking that we won't revisit things that we have corrected for in the past, but I am just thankful to the Lord for showing us each day that our hard work is paying off.  For example, today we went out to run some errands.  It was so much fun!  We spent over an hour in Hobby Lobby collecting items for our advent project!  It was awesome to walk each row and look at things I wanted to look at and have our sweet little boy walk beside me not touching anything!!  Then we went over to the mall to just walk around!  I think I can count on two hands how many times I have been to this mall in three years.  I am just not a shopper.  We went to Hallmark so that he could pick out an ornament for this year (which I got for $1.05! because of a reward certificate that I had and a $5.00 coupon...can't beat that for a Hallmark ornament).  He loved walking the mall, looking at things and staring at Santa from afar.  I gave him a dollar in quarters before we went into the mall and told him that if he obeyed that he could use that dollar to ride a machine when we were about to leave.  He was so excited about hearing those quarters (which he calls pennies) in his pocket!  But here is what melted my heart the most and almost brought tears to my eyes (I did tear up telling Josh the story tonight). I am in love with those sugared pecans (I have only had them 3 times in my life but they are so good).  There was a man selling them so I stopped and bought us a small bag.  That sweet man gave me an extra empty bag for Josiah so he could carry his own.  I put some of the pecans in his bag and we continued walking while snacking on our yummy pecans.  All of the sudden Josiah started folding the top of his bag down (with pecans still in it) and I said "buddy, are you all done or do you not like them?"  His response to me was "I saving these for Daddy.  I gonna share with him when he gets home."  OH MY WORD.  He thought of that all on his own.  He loves his Daddy and Josh has been at work late every night this week with Pathfinder school.  In fact, the other night Josiah said we couldn't eat dinner without him - that he wanted to wait until he got home...but we had to because I knew Josh would be late.  I just love Josiah's heart...We have prayed for him to be kind, loving, and that he would think about others before himself and I am seeing it more and more each day.  So, when we have difficult times with him testing his limits I will be reminded of these situations..I will be reminded that the Lord calls us to train our children and we will continue to follow His leading in parenting!!!!  Thank you, Lord for the gift you have given to us...a gift named Josiah Michael Sandler!

Proverbs 22:6
    "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it."