Eighteen years pass in a hurry
___My, how time flies when you're raising kids--and having fun.
___Eighteen years ago this week, Lindsay Michelle Knox arrived, kicking and screaming, into this dear world. We knew we were in for something. But we were too young and inexperienced and just plain excited to know exactly what.
___Lindsay was supposed to be born a day earlier. Joanna already was two weeks overdue, and Dr. Farmer decided our little baby--we didn't know her gender; those were the "old days" before automatic sonograms--needed to see some daylight.
___But that wasn't what Lindsay--we still called her Bubba Lee Roy for want of a better name--had in mind. Like I said, we should've known we were in for something.
___Jo and I arrived at the hospital on a Tuesday, election day, long before dawn. The nurses hooked her up to IVs, and Dr. Farmer made his first visit. Then we waited. And waited.
___That evening, as I downed a hamburger in the waiting room, I ran into the husband of a couple we met that morning when we arrived at the hospital.
___"You guys are still waiting too?" I asked, incredulously.
___"Naw," he replied. "She spit that baby out--it's our third, you know--hours ago. She's back there havin' her tubes tied."
___By that time, I felt like she might have had time to go home, get pregnant again and come back to deliver her fourth child.
___We waited some more. By sunup the next morning, we were just one day shy of Martin Luther's 500th birthday, and I tried to convince Jo to hold on. But she and Lindsay were ready, and here our baby came. She was slimy and crying. And absolutely the most precious thing I'd ever seen.
___Eighteen years later, Lindsay looks a lot different of course. She looks so much like her mother that kids at school come up to Jo and say, "You must be Lindsay's mom."
___Now she's having her 18th birthday. It's a big one. Next year, she'll be in college, and she may not be home on her day. I've been thinking about that a lot. As her daddy, I've been wanting to smother her in my own attention and affection, which would, of course, be a way of focusing all her attention and affection on me.
___Her mother reminds me daddies aren't the center of the universe. Especially daddies of 18-year-olds. Just as Lindsay has grown physically these 18 years, she's matured emotionally, spiritually and socially. She doesn't need Jo and me now like she did back then. And while that takes some getting used to, it's also a blessing and God's design.
___You couldn't have told me that 18 years ago, when I was thinking about having a child born on Luther's birthday and a wife in the "Book of World Records."
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