Awesome Saturday

I have lots of things I want to tell you about Eleanor. I want to tell you all about her name and why we picked it. I want to tell you about her funny faces and smooshy cheeks. And I will. I'll get around to it, but after a week, I still have some thoughts rattling around my brain about her birth, some stuff I've been trying to put into words.

So, I went into labor on Good Friday. At some point in the evening, I was sitting in the room, on drugs, having contractions, but chatting with my folks, my brother, his wife and my husband. We were talking about Good Friday and the importance of it, and pre-conceived notions that we have about Christ and Christianity from popular culture versus what the Bible actually says. It was interesting conversation to be having during labor.

I really wanted to have my baby on Friday. I really wanted to have her "naturally", although in retrospect, I think what I really wanted was to be given the opportunity to try, which I had, and that's good. I knew at 10pm that this was going to be a Saturday baby, which was ok, though again, not what I wanted.

Ok, but the point that I've been trying to distill is that Friday was a hard day. Physically, it was draining. Emotionally, it was draining. Along the way from "hey, I think that's a contraction" to "did my water just break" to the eventual trip to the O.R., there were some hard decisions that had to be made. The path that I was on wasn't the one I wanted. I had lots of time in those 23 hours to pray that things would go differently. They didn't. I had to face down some of my biggest fears (as far as birth is concerned), and while I am not trying to say that my suffering was in any way as great or as meaningful as Christ's, in light of it being Good Friday, I was very mindful of the fact that even though things weren't going the way I wanted, I was still in God's hands. He wasn't going to let me go or abandon me.

It made Sunday just that much sweeter. While *the* Good Friday changed my life forever, this Good Friday did too. It was a hard day, but I emerged on the other side changed. I'm a mother now. We had an awesome Saturday. I got to celebrate Easter with my parents, grandparents, and all my nieces and nephews. It was an explosion of life, of celebrating life, and at the heart, that's what Easter is about--celebrating the gift of life, eternal life.

Also, I got to put my baby in a basket. So, there's that!