I've received so many thoughtful comments in the past few days on both the surrender entry and the blog birthday post. Normally, I would try to respond individually to each of these, as I so appreciate and value the time each of you takes to leave a comment here.
However, all weekend I've been nearly consumed with thinking about how to share with you today what I've been hinting at for a while now.
And I spent the last hour writing up a long, probably fairly convoluted post to spell the whole thing out, and then I lost my internet connection and in two seconds flat, it was gone.
Consider taking a moment to praise God for sparing you from all of that.
Here's the thing. Some months ago, my dear friend Laura and I began talking about how when our daughters were born, the only direction in approaches to parenting we received from family members and friends at church about how to adjust to life with a new baby came in the form of a parenting manual that recommends, amongst other things, infant sleep-training and scheduled feedings. The parents who recommended this material to us are people whom we deeply love and respect, but each of us as new mothers felt if we weren't following the material that had worked for them and their families, that we were somehow on the path to failure as mothers.
Through many emails and phone conversations, we began to wonder if there were other new parents who were Christians who also felt as discouraged, disappointed, and disheartened as we did in our inability to follow the directives of this manual.
We felt fairly confident there was more than one way to grow kids God's way.
Each of us began to feel a burden to get some thoughts down on paper that would offer an alternative to Christian parents; something fairly radical in its differences to the one book that seems to get passed around from family to family, making its rounds within small groups of believers who want to honor God with their parenting.
We discovered as we talked things out that we shared a philosophy that there is another way, a way that can find support in Scripture, a way that each of us felt infinitely more at peace in following when each of our babies were in their first year of life. As we began to actually write down our beliefs, we began to feel more passionate about getting these thoughts into the hands of other Christian parents, on the off chance that we really weren't the only ones who struggled with the more mainstream approach many of our friends followed.
This is where it all gets very, very risky.
We want to take this collection of thoughts, this belief in an approach to parenting that looks towards the parenting example that God sets as our Heavenly Father, seeks to follow Christ's call to servanthood, and relies on the wisdom of the Holy Spirit to guide us in meeting the unique, individual needs of our babies (Laura's words there), and have it all published.
As a book.
This very week we are working on creating our first query letter to an agent, and since we are officially doing this thing, I felt it was only appropriate that I share this with y'all. Some of the behind-the-scenes emails I've had with readers through the past few years have fueled my belief that Laura and I aren't the only ones who were hoping someone would tell us, "If that approach doesn't work for you, maybe consider trying this?"
What will that mean for SortaCrunchy? Simply a slight shift away from natural living practices and other kinds of advocacy for a little while so that we can focus on discussions about parenting. I've asked Laura to contribute some of her thoughts in the next few weeks, and I know you'll so enjoy getting to hear from her (as she is infinitely more talented than I am! Shut up, Laura! It's true!).
So that's it. Our big reveal. Our passion, our heart, and our dream.
Thanks for allowing me to share it here. Thanks for allowing us to trust you with this.
Photo courtesy of me. Dacey at one month.