TEN

Dear Addison,

You are officially out of the single digits.  Which is agonizing for your mama.  How did that happen so fast?  It couldn't have been ten years ago that you were born and your Dad and I looked at you with such love and wondered WHAT IN THE WORLD HAVE WE DONE?!  You, our daughter, multiplied our love in a million different ways and shattered our confidence at least that much, too.  I'm not sure that there were two more ill-equipped people on the planet to parent you.  Or mostly just me - your daddy has been a rock star from the beginning.  You are a reminder that God's grace is sufficient.

This year we watched you walk through tremendous heartache and grief.  Loss after loss, the hurt just kept coming.  In those hard moments, we saw God's victorious hand building your Faith.

We watched you navigate a difficult friendship that turned into bullying. We watched you stand your ground. We saw the freedom standing firm brought you.

I've watched your silliness, your compassion, your mothering heart, your sass and attitude and your drama.  OH THE DRAMA.  I'm buckling up for the next 10 years.

What I'm trying to say is that we are watching you develop character.  We see you growing up and practicing principles of God's Word.  And we are not just watching, Addiecakes.  We are in the trenches with you, covering you with prayer and love and grace and mercy.  We couldn't love you any more or less because of your actions, but watching growth in your life is one of the most amazing treasures of motherhood.

I pray that 10 will be such a sweet year for you.  A year with much joy.  A year of extraordinary.  Because that's who our God is.  He is extraordinary and His plans for you are extraordinary as well.  So if those plans include hard, so be it, because we have seen you do hard things, babygirl.  And He doesn't include hard with no reason.

A few months back when talking to your Uncle Brian, he was commenting on not knowing how to parent a 9 year old girl.  He thought it was because they adopted your cousin only a few months before that.  But then I told him that your dad and I didn't know any more than he did - that this was our first try at parenting a 9 year old girl.  That sums up how I feel about you being 10.  You are our first double digit kid.  And I'm not sure how to mother a 10 year old.  All I'm saying is, go easy on us, ok.  We are AMATEURS.

I love you the morest,
Mom