It's so TINY!!

       This week I discovered a new hobby. The bad part is, I think it will eventually drive me crazy. Earlier this week I found myself wandering through NBA.com. One of my favorite former Hoosiers, D.J. White, was signed by the Boston Celtics last week, so I started reading the Celtics website for information about the signing. The website had a link to the Celtics online store, so I thought, “Hey, let’s see if they’re selling D.J.’s jersey.” At the time, I thought, this would take 30 seconds, then I can get back to doing other things. Then it happened. On the Celtics site they had jerseys that could be personalized, like all the other team’s sites have, but at the bottom of the screen I noticed a little, tiny, infant Celtics jersey. That was it. I was hooked. First I decided I’d make a Celtics jersey with #33 (for Larry Bird) that said “Brown” on the back. It was awesome! Then I thought I should wander over to the Pacers team site and see what those would look like. A white Pacers jersey with “Brown #40” on the back was first. But after you do a white one, you have to do a gold one. Then, after you’ve done a gold one and a white one, it’s only reasonable to see what one looks like in blue, right? Right? Anybody?

    I’d like to say that I didn’t make tiny personalized jerseys of every former IU player also. Again, I’d like to say that…but I can’t. Baby jerseys of Eric Gordon, Alan Henderson, D.J. White, and (the greatest of all time!) Calbert Cheaney were all on the screen before I was done. I even went ahead and tried a few different teams for Cody Zeller and Victor Oladipo (just in case). Finally, I convinced myself that I needed to stop. I figured that it was a nice way to kill 10 minutes or so, but I was done. The bad part is that 10 minutes I wasted actually lasted closer to 45.

    I’m not sure why I got so engrossed in making baby basketball jerseys. I mean, sure, they were probably some of the cutest things I’ve ever seen, but why was I obsessing over them like that? I guess it’s because it got our child’s picture in my head. I mean, I could imagine taking him to basketball games and seeing people say, “Is that baby wearing a Steve Alford jersey? That’s awesome!” (Ok, maybe some people won’t care, but I’m sure it will turn the heads of a few IU fans.)

    Anytime things like this happen and I picture our child, I get more and more excited. I see kid’s stuff in a store or online and I think about whether we’d get something like that for our kid. We have conversations all the time about things we will or won’t do with our child. Everything from what he’ll wear to what we’ll watch on TV with him. And that’s why the little jerseys will drive me crazy. The waiting is hard enough, but the more I have to picture my child (and he’s a really cute kid, at least in my head), the more I think about having to wait. It’s brutal, but we don’t have any other choice. In the meantime, we’re trying to remember that we need to be patient and this will all work out not in our time, but in God’s time. It’s all in His hands, we can only hold up our end of things and let Him take care of the things we can’t.

     Patience is one of those things that’s easier said than done, but we’re working on it. By the end of this thing we’ll either lose our minds or be the most patient people you’ll ever meet. And maybe that’s God’s plan all along, to help us become more patient before we bring our child home. I suppose it is good practice. In the meantime, I think I’ll head over to nfl.com and see what kind of infant Colts jerseys we can buy. Obviously the whole patient thing hasn’t kicked in yet.

"Our willingness to wait reveals the value we place on the object we're waiting for."