Beautiful Children...God's Children

Since I have been sick the past few days, I have not had much energy to do much besides sleep and sit. While I was sitting yesterday in front of the TV, I happened upon a show on TLC called "Toddlers and Tiaras". Yikes. It made me hope very much that I would not have a little girl if those are the sort of pressures that raising a little girl entails. What if her classmates compete in stuff like that and criticize her for not being pretty enough? Teaching a child to compete to be the prettiest from the time they can walk is almost sickening to me. Now, granted, the thought has crossed my mind, "What if I have an ugly child?" Then I always feel bad. Of course, I would love it if my child is moderately adorable, but I don't understand why parents push their children to look "the best", which is usually fake in those beauty pageants. Watching a bit of that show motivated me to begin praying now that our little child, boy or girl, would grow to believe that they are beautiful because they are a child of God, and saved by Jesus. No other beauty matters than the beauty of redemption and adoption in Christ. I pray that I can teach that truth to them very early on to spare them the heartaches of trying to live up to the world's standards of beauty.