Happy Birthday!

Your birthday has arrived and with it the cold. It's blustery this morning, drizzly and gray. You woke at 5:45, ready to celebrate.

All the cliches are true--it's impossible to believe you've already been around a full year (i.e. how time flies!) and impossible to believe you've ONLY been around for one year (did life exist before Thisbe?).

Soon I'll dress you in a fuscia onesie and flowered overalls. We'll pack you into the car along with a cooler full of hard boiled eggs, three bushels of apples, a beanbag toss game, diaper bag, suitcases, and a slick garment bag filled with fancy clothes. We'll drive to Luthercrest Bible camp in Alexandria, we'll unfold ourselves from the car, and we'll hug your Uncle John and Aunt Anna, who will be married tomorrow. Tonight we'll put a candle in a cupcake and sing to you and think about 7:45pm last year, the moment you emerged into this lit, breezy, Kodachrome world.

It's only now, one year later, that I can see how remarkably our worlds (mine and Daddy's) changed along with yours. The world we live in now is full of a kind of gravity and richness we didn't possess before we met you, Thiz. All the big words (love, grief, suffering, faith)--they mean something new and different to us now.

Tomorrow at John and Anna's wedding, I will read these words:

"You will go out in joy
and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and hills
will burst into song before you,
and all the trees of the field
will clap their hands."

May your life, dear one, be filled with joy and peace; may you be given ample time to burst into song and clap your hands; may you explore wildly (yet carefully) the mountains and hills and fields; may you be given moments that deepen, enrich, and re-start your life the way that the moment of your birth (and the moments that followed) have deepened, enriched, and re-started ours. We love you so.