The Burrus Family: Evie's Infant Recognition Day

Every year, our church has "infant recognition day," during which all the infants born in the past year are "recognized." We did this last year with Charlie, having NO idea that we'd be lucky enough to do it again this year! :) It was so fun getting to have a special day just for Evie, and she did great on her big day. Embarrassingly, this was our first trip to church since Evie's birth (in our defense, Clint has worked almost every Sunday since she was born), and it was quite the experience. We started off okay--amazingly, we were dressed and out the door with time to spare. But things started to deteriorate shortly thereafter. We had to drop Charlie off in the child-care center while we took Evie to "rehearsal." Charlie, despite the fact that the child-care center looks like toddler wonderland, was NOT happy to be left. He started wailing as soon as he realized what was going on, and was making enough of a scene that the women working in the nursery called me back to make sure I'd written my cell phone number down. Uh oh. So off to rehearsal we went, complaining about the futility of having to come an hour early for something we'd already done last year. Since we figured we had the recognition bit down, we spent rehearsal visiting with friends and exclaiming over babies. It wasn't until after the service started and we got in front of the congregation that we realized we had missed the point of rehearsal: to take the card with your baby's name on it to hand to the pastor at the appropriate moment. Since we hadn't taken it, Evie's card had been removed. So Clint and I were whispering nervously at the front of the church about how to get the pastor to say Evie's name without the card--because after getting the four of us to church and leaving Charlie in the nursery, we did NOT want the trip to be in vain. Our solution: we were the only parents to whisper our child's name to the pastor when he got to us. Luckily, it worked fine and Evie was appropriately recognized. We then returned to our pew with our sweet (now very awake and very hungry) little girl to find two missed calls on my cellphone. Clint hurried over to the child care center and found a very distraught little Charlie, who recovered quickly when he learned that he was going to get to come sit in church with us. Everything went fine for the next few minutes while I fed Evie, but she then decided she had a burp that wouldn't come out and started wailing loudly. I rushed out with her, and heard a loud "Mama! Mama!" behind me. The sound continued, and soon Clint rushed out with Charlie. We decided we had about all we could handle, and so Clint snuck back in, grabbed our bags, and came out to shepherd us to our car. So our first trip back to church wasn't a huge success, but hopefully next time around, we'll make it the whole way through the service. Baby steps, right? :)

Here's Miss Evie, all dressed up for her big day.