Social Experiment?

A few weeks ago, a friend took a photo of Ba Ba and put it up on her Facebook account. Her friend saw it and commented that I must look like Ba Ba when I was a baby. And I had to carefully think before I comment. And in the end, I wrote as it is, that Ba Ba is adopted. A few days earlier, I was on Facetime with Joanne, my sister and was teasing little JC to wake up. We joked that little JC has the Sim blood because she's like us, hates to wake up early in the morning. And then I mentioned that Ba Ba doesn't have the Sim blood because he loves to wake up at the crack of dawn.

When I look at the physical aspect of Ba Ba, there's nothing that I can say he has inherited from us. Nothing at all simply because he's adopted. I can't be proud and say, oh look, he's got Babe's beautiful smile or face or whatever. But I've got to say that Babe and he does look quite alike. Then when I look Ba Ba, yes, he has probably some of our mannerisms because he obviously hangs out a lot with us. And with his character, there's probably bits of us in him. There's the discussion on nature versus nurture. Obviously, with little Ba Ba, there's no nature but there's lots of nurturing from us, we hope.

So here is the social experiment question. Our parenting style or rather my parenting style (Babe tends to agree with me unless I decide to do something very radical) is that every child is born like a blank piece of paper. It's up to us as parents to teach, to mould, to fill up the child's brains and characters with what we would like to. So with our parenting, we give little Ba Ba freedom within boundaries, we don't baby talk. We tell him what is expected of him. He does get little smacks when he does something naughty. And yes, at this stage, he's a boy that we're proud of. He understands that meal times he has to be at the dining table. He understands that crying is not going to get him what he wants. And the list goes on.

But am I saying that I've succeeded in our social experiment? Am I going to be the smug mother and tell the other mothers who have crying babies what they should and should not do? No, I've not succeeded in any social experiment. It's not our doing so we can't take the credit for it. However, this is what we have done so far. We pray for little Ba Ba. Every night before we go to bed, Babe and I would say a prayer for little Ba Ba. Actually, even before Ba Ba came to us, I prayed for the child that we were going to have. Yes, lots of prayers have gone into Ba Ba and the prayers will continue.

So you have it, we have no part in the social experiment. God has His hands in it. What we merely did was to take extra care of the wonderful present that God has so loving lavished on us and we pray earnestly that Ba Ba will turn out to be a man after God's heart.