Snowdays . . .

Having grown up in South Africa I did not get to participate in the proverbial American tradition of the "snowday". So you can imagine my enthusiasm yesterday during practice lab when our instructor told us class was already canceled for today since they were predicting horrible white out conditions. Well, only about now at 1pm has the snow really started to come down, but it so happened to fall on my son's birthday. Which is really special since I have been sad to have to miss important days like this -- or rather trying to be everything to everyone on those days. So this way, both he and I got to stay home and Paul has ended up working from home. So it's been a lazy day of Starbucks, talking about his birth, singing Happy Birthday with a candle filled cupcake, visits from friends, and phone calls from all our loved ones.

Today is really the day, that marks where most of my passion for birth came from. It's the day I became a mother. The day I realized that I could never be enough for this tiny baby, and the day I felt completely empowered as a woman recognizing my design to do something this miraculous -- in a spiritual, physical and emotional way. Well for those of you who know the story. It would have been about now that after 30hours of labor and my water having broken at 2 in the morning I was being told that I would have to be put on Pitocin, but it did speed things up . . . and make them 30x more painful . . . but it did end in his birth at 9:20pm.

Being at a friend's Blessing Way, a ceremony of Navajo tradition that we've modified that celebrates the various landmark moments as a woman journeys through life (the read more on blessing ways http://www.mother-care.ca/blessing.htm ). This special time with women celebrating a new birth reminded me of the blessing of being a woman. The opportunities we have to celebrate our creation and our design and our uniqueness together. It was such a special time of being together and celebrating our friend's third home birth and her strength and influence in the world.