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It’s 11pm on February 23rd.

A year ago I was eating a pint of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and the knowledge that our family(and my body for that matter) would forever change the next day was both real(hence the pint of ice cream) and completely untouchable.

I’d done it three times before, the expecting, the laboring, the greeting.

I knew she was a girl and I knew that I would love her.

But I didn’t know yet her eyes, those life-giving eyes, holding mine.

My body knew her from the inside but soon we would join together skin to skin, warmth to warmth. Joy repeating that she was mine, still there, just waiting to be held each time I would lift her from her bed.

I didn’t know yet the liquid velvet of her skin as she lay beside me nursing or the fervent affection of her siblings that would follow me throughout the days.

In all the adjustment(chaos, sometimes tears, forever stretching) of adding a fourth child to our family, the one thing that’s been right the entire time is this baby girl.

You might say that I gave life to her one year ago, I’d say she’s given all of us life each day since.

She is enjoyed.

Eating ice cream that night, I didn’t know.  Tonight I do.