My house is blissfully quiet at the moment, just like Saturday mornings should be - when the world is yours to explore at your leisure. Himself fixed us breakfast while I bathed Baby Girl. Even that was serene. For whatever reason, she decided that today it was okay to have one's diaper changed and to sit in lukewarm water and be washed. I dressed her and handed her to Himself to put down for the first of her morning naps. I'm curled up on the couch in my fuzzy blue robe and Baby Girl is lying on the other end, swaddled like a little burrito, finally succombing to sleep after spending 10 minutes just staring at me. (Why she can fall asleep so peacefully in the day time and not at night is still a puzzle to us all - I'm getting MY nights and days mixed up now!).
Today's post was going to be "the rest of the story" I began earlier in the week, but as I bathed Baby Girl and looked at all her little parts, I drifted back to a conversation Himself and I had last night before family prayer. We looked at Baby Girl, and I said, "I'm having a hard time comprehending that we made her."
I'm terrible at arts and crafts. I had a fair amount of drawing talent in my pre-teen years, but I did nothing with it. However, through all attempts to become crafty (toll painting class at age 10, trying to learn to crochet in college, the sewing lesson disasters in junior high and high school, etc.), I have failed miserably.
Yet, somehow, in the miraculous design of life, I was able to create something so much more intricate, detailed and complex than a wall hanging, a Halloween costume or a blanket. As I bathed her this morning, I marveled at Baby Girl and the fact that Himself and I joined together to create her. I thought about the first ultrasound at 7 weeks, where we joked that she looked like an apostrophe. I thought about the 10-week ultrasound where I exclaimed (loudly!) "We have arms and legs!" - vocalizing relief from a fear that had haunted me for weeks. I thought about her 20-week ultrasound when the tech announced we were having a Baby Girl, and how I cried in sheer joy. I thought about the hosptial stay at 25 weeks, when I hadn't felt her move in 24 hours, and, for the first time, I cared more for her well-being than mine.
Then I thought about two weeks ago when all of the pains and aggravations and inconveniences of pregancy and labor ceased to exist as I held my little girl for the first time. I thought of the overwhelming emotion that flooded through me from the moment she left my body - and how my heart really did break as she took part of it with her, forever binding her to me. I thought of the tears in Himself's eyes and the look that somehow was only barely captured in the photos - the look of absolute contentment.
With her goofy expressions, her propsensity to roll her eyes at us already, the borrowed wisdom of her life as a spirit, her pug nose, her refusal to straighten her legs unless she is completely relaxed, her one-eyed-eyebrow-raised-as-if-to-say "oh really?!" look that she gives when I nudge her and reminder her that she cannot eat and sleep at the same time - Baby Girl has completely and utterly captured every ounce of love in our home.
I am completely overwhelmed when I look at her scrawny little legs, her bigger-than-average feet, and the chipmunk cheeks she inherited from her mother - in all my life, I've wanted to make something that would make people say, "Wow. You are so talented." I simply never dreamed it would come in the form of a perfectly formed infant daughter.
She might not get me kudos in arts and crafts, but I'll trade all of that for another blissful Saturday morning just like this one, watching my tiny little girl sleep.
1 comment:
Better be careful or that nurturing gene is going to come out in you. ;)
Very very sweet.
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