The best things in life....

....definitely don't come cheap. :-) I of course am not referring to financially here.

Baby was born at 3:42 Monday morning after a labor that was really fast but, in my estimation, a lot harder than my last one. Ben was the perfect coach again (he's great....he said early on "Just let me know what to do. And not do." And then he was just his quiet strong presence that keeps me going through this mess of life!) And my midwife was phenomenal. I just love the way that midwives do birthing of babies! She was so helpful...with both babies I've had these serious "I can't do this, you need to at least give me IV meds or I'm going to DIE, right NOW" moments. Not only did Liz (the midwife) know that I really didn't mean that, but she knew me well enough to know what to say at which points in labor to get me out of that mindset. It was great.

Baby is positively perfect and beautiful. I don't sleep much (no surprise there), but it's not because he doesn't. He sleeps great...I just have to watch him! I had forgotten how absolutely tiny and amazing little ones are.

So I've been pondering on the grace of God in three aspects of this experience. First of all, things for the semester did NOT get wrapped up. I still have one paper I need to finish, and one that's barely in embryonic state...on Saturday I had set up my plan to finish the one on Monday morning, finish the other Monday afternoon and night, edit on Tuesday and then turn them in. Well, I was off by about 2 days. And I've realized that God's in charge, and that's okay. Everything is going to work out. The second thing is that I'm amazed that babies can even make it into being....with all of the things that have to go right at just the right moments, and all the ways in which they can go wrong...it's amazing that it happens right so much of the time. The last thing is just how cool that we can do so many things that we didn't know we could. Specifically I'm thinking of my decision, about 3/4 through labor, that I just couldn't do it and had made a really bad choice to even try. And then I did it anyway. I think that being able to learn just how far beyond our limits we can go is a really great chance.