Baby Dedication

Our church does a baby dedication every year for the babies born the previous year. This past Sunday Ainsley was "dedicated". It is a time of reflection for families to focus on their baby/family and commit to raising them in the Lord. It is also a time for the church to see all of those who have started families or have continued to extend their families in the past year. Since our church is pretty big, it's hard to know how many babies there actually are, and boy are there a lot! I too enjoyed seeing all of the babies right around Ainsley's age that I hadn't seen before. The parents were asked to stand and commit to dedicating not only our children's lives, but to rededicate our lives to Christ and raise them to be Godly people. As the 2 Children's Ministers called the name of each child and their families to come on to the stage, they had a slide show with pictures of each child/family along with the baby's birthday. Ainsley was also given a Bible and a little book of blessings and words of encouragement from members who currently are or have been a part of our congregation over the past several years. It was such a nice service and I was so excited for Ainsley to be a part of it. I now know how meaningful this experience is and cannot wait for those having babies this year to be able to go through it themselves. We love our Church family.

It was very interesting having Ainsley in service with us. Let's just say that our VERY serious quiet baby decided to let her light shine and was the loudest most talkative one! (Not to mention a major wiggle worm as well.) Brantley did take her out and walk around with her at one point, but that didn't last long. And the bottle I brought thinking surely it would make her go to sleep because she hadn't had a nap yet didn't help either. It was pretty funny and we were saying, "Shhh," to her as if she had any clue what that meant. And ever since Sunday she has been talking away like crazy! Today her new thing was the "b" sound. This is her first consonant sound to make and I finally got her repeating me saying "bye-bye". (Over and over and over again). It's so funny to me to hear her making all of these new sounds and talking so much. I could just eat her up and LOVE her to death. She is the most amazing thing in the world and I am so happy to get to be home with her and experience this time of her life. What a special time and I will cherish it forever.

Our church just recently went to 2 services and these were the families at 2nd service with babies born this past year. (I'm in the red sweater. Ainsley was mesmerized by all of the people and kids behind us. She barely looked towards the audience.)

After service, there was a luncheon. Each table was assigned to a family and had a special centerpiece to label it. We got to take home the "A" and gift bag, which had some cute personalized note cards in it. So cute!

Eating puffs and cheerios and looking at me like I'm crazy...

Beautiful girl

Very good, close family friends of ours from growing up. Lynn ("Lolli") and my mom are besties and are together all of the time! Who ever knew we'd all end up here in Nashville together? It's wonderful having them so close by.

~Carrie and Ainsley~

Carrie and Justin are Don's and Lynn's (above) son and daughter-in-law. Justin and I were babies together. As you can see, they are about to have a baby themselves! Carrie is due, ummm, this week! They all go to the same church we do, so they will get to share this experience next year with Owen Kate. We cannot wait to meet this baby girl!

(If you can't tell, Ainsley was getting very cranky at this point and ready to go home and crash!)

I was happy that my family was able to be a part of this day, although we wished all of our family could be there.