Dear Kid,
Well, your arrival is more eminent than I thought when I wrote the first one of these! I see your sense of humor is developing nicely.
Dad and I are so excited to meet you. We show it in different ways. I’m over here reading a stack of parenting books, making sample homeschool routines, and planning your high school curriculum. Dad says “Yes” when I ask if he’s excited to be a dad.
We show our excitement in different ways because we’re different people. That’s okay. Your personality will be different from ours, which means in a few years there will be three of us doing life together and learning from three different points of view.
Personally, I’m a planner. Since learning of your impending arrival, I have:
- Read a book on newborn care
- Started a list of equipment for our homeschool room
- Researched the cost of Hooked on Phonics
- Subscribed to podcasts about discipline techniques and raising responsible kids
- Helped Dad find ways to improve our family devotion routine so it’s strong by the time you’re ready to participate
- and more I’ve already forgotten
I have plans for you. Plans to help you become a strong reader early. Plans to foster a love of learning. Plans to make you a critical thinker, an independent learner, a diligent student.
Plans to give you a rich Bible education with exposure to apologetics, theology, Christian history, an understanding of the people and places of the Bible, and more. Plans to help you build relationships with your grandparents and your great-grandparents.
These plans are fun to make. They create good conversations for Dad and I. They will also likely be discarded once you arrive and prove contrary to my carefully laid research!
I accept this. It’s my firm belief it’s better to adjust a plan already in place than not have one at all.
It’s also fun to think that even now, you are your own person. We’ll make the decisions while you are young. But as you grow, you’ll be responsible for more. You’ll decide what kind of person you want to be.
What will be important to you?
What will you pursue?
What do you think gives your life meaning?
As I wrote in my first letter to you, I hope you learn there is a God who loves you. Learning how to read, how to code, how to be a good student, and everything else is always secondary to that.
We’ve got some plans for you, kiddo. We’re getting ready for your arrival as best we can. We’ll learn from our mistakes. Plans will be adjusted. The general gist is that you are entering a family that loves God, loves learning, and loves each other.
(Maybe you’ll love making plans too. We will outnumber your father! Evil laugh.)