Smell the Onion

I really firmly believe that children are engineered pretty well. 
They’re programmed to learn to crawl, walk, talk, feed themselves,
potty train etc, etc, and (given a healthy child in a healthy
environment) will reach all of these milestones without very much
prodding or “training” by their parents.  This opinion has been
borne out time and again in our own parenting journey.  It is
comforting, amazing, and humbling.  Comforting, because I realize
that if I don’t “push” my child to use a fork, or sleep all night, that
I can’t really ruin her.  She’ll most likely be doing both before
she leaves for college.  Amazing, because it’s incredible to watch
her develop just as she was designed to do, learning new and amazing
feats of coordination and dexterity.  Humbling, because I can’t
take much credit for how she turns out. 

I believe God knew what he was doing when he created babies, and that
he also knew what he was doing when he created mothers. 
Ahem…but I digress.

All this is to say that Tim and I have never left Maya alone when we
knew it would make her hysterical, which up until recently, was most of
the time.  We’ve gotten our “couple time” in other ways…leaving
her with family, or having friends come hang out at our house and
listen for her while she’s sleeping so we can go out for coffee. 
This means that we haven’t been away for the weekend or anything since
she was born (but who can afford that anyway?), and it also means that
we haven’t sat together for an entire sermon since she was about three
months old.  There are people in our lives that think we’re being
lilly livered, and that we should leave her, hysterical or not, 
because “she’ll get over it after she cries awhile” or “she needs to
learn that you’ll come back.” 

Well.  We walked in to church today, and opened the door to the nursery so she could see inside. 
“Would you like to go play with Hudson?” we asked. 
“Mommy come too?”
“No, sweet girl, Mommy and Daddy are going to go in to church.  You may stay and play though.” 
And so, she toddled through the door, found a toy car, and barely
looked up as we said goodbye.  (Oh, that’s another thing, we don’t
do the “sneaky sneak out” thing.)  She stayed, quite happily in
the nursery through ALL of the service today.  She *has* learned
that she will be safe when we leave her and that we will return, all
without hysterics, AND before she was 10.  Ahem. 
Thankyouverymuch.