BIrth-day

So, today is the big day. Liel is 2! In celebration and commemoration, I offer a few pictures, a stroll down memory lane. Here is Liel nursing for the first time, about 30 seconds after she was born.


Here she getting measured on our bed, after her little snack.


Here she is being held by her daddy for the first time.

Zion slept through her birth and much of my labor. He did go over to Kenny's for a while in the evening, for dinner and some play time. Then he came home and went to bed, and when he woke up in the morning he had a sister. Uncle Kenny came over to meet her on his way to work.



Of course, most of the actual birthing of Liel took place the day before she truly entered the world. I am so incredibly grateful to have been able to homebirth my kids. Home is where I am comfortable. I know where everything is, I know who touched it, I know who's been there, and if they were sick or not. Home is normal, and in my experience birthing there normalizes the process of labor and birth, as life flows and moves around the experience. During my labor with Liel I baked scones. I was in reasonably hard labor (contractions every 2-3 minutes), and baking gave me something to focus on aside from the pain of contractions, and really did remind me that what I was going through was normal, as normal as baking a batch of scones. After Liel was born, Robert, the midwives and I ate the scones. Liel entered our lives seamlessly, part of an organic, continuous whole.

She is such a blessing and a joy, a daily reminder of the advice that her namesake, Siduri, gave to Gilgamesh: "Fill your belly with good things; day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice. Let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too is the lot of man."