Father Knows Best

This past weekend, I spent some time camping up near Lake of the Woods in Northwestern Minnesota.  On Saturday night, after a long day of fishing (we caught 6 walleyes, between my son, father-in-law, and myself), we retired early.

However, around 1am, my youngest soon-to-be-six-year-old daughter Mykayla woke up crying.  She does this on occasion, and usually it's a nightmare and that once I wake her up, interrupting the dream, she drinks a sip of water and falls back to sleep.

Not this night.

The crying fit lasted for over an hour, in which time my in-laws started waking up too.  I prayed to God to help her get to sleep.  Sorry, He wasn't buying that one.  At least in such an easy way.  Frustrated, I got up.  I picked her up, gave her a little water, and asked her if she was okay.  Did she hurt anywhere?  (My wife and I were thinking of possible ear infections at this point).

Mykayla--whom is nicknamed KK--shook her head.

"Did you have a dream, KK?" I asked.

Again, she shook her head.

As she is a type 1 diabetic, I checked her blood sugar.  It was a little high at 481, but I did a "correction" on her diabetes pump and held her a bit longer.  I prayed to God again to let her sleep.  Minutes later, she started sobbing.  I kissed her on the cheek and asked, very softly, "Are you scared of something?"

This time she nodded.  "Bugs," she said.

I knew she had a little fear of bugs, as many kids do (oh, heck, I really, really, really, really hate spiders so go figure), so we talked a little bit about bugs.  Why were they so scary?

"They can bite," she said.

I then told her about a Pixar movie called A Bug's Life.  She giggled.  I then said that all of the bugs she knows are much, much smaller than her and that she could squash it with her finger.  Well, this got her laughing so hard that she started asking me about all of the bugs we could squash.  In the end, she said she was ready to sleep.

And sleep she did.

Afterwards, I realized that I recieved God's answer to help KK stop crying.  Father knows best, so to speak.  I needed God to work his wonder through me, to help my daughter sleep.  KK is still afraid of bugs, but at least this time she can laugh about it when we talk about the Pixar movie.