A bitter cup.

I've been looking at you lately, my sweet Danny boy, and thinking to myself 'I can't believe that last september, you were a wish in my heart.' Your own hadn't even starting beating yet. I've been thinking about the night you were born, how it was such a dream and how it empowered me. My soul grew in leaps that night. You were a miracle. I delivered you. And I felt every single part of that journey. I did it. I'm so glad I did. And I'm so glad you're mine. Happy three month birthday, baby. I love you so.

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Just before my water broke the night Danny was born, Jared sat beside the bath holding my head. It's a strange thing, labor. You expect it and you know it will come, (it has to come!) and still you wait. (We waited.) And as you wait, you wonder and you race around what's about to take place, what you're about to feel and what's about to unfold. And there's butterflies and fear spun up in this foreboding feeling. I think one of the sweetest moments for us that night, we exchanged there by the bath. Every pain that would come, Jared would breathe and close his eyes and full of emotion, tell me we were never going to do this again (which was so sweet, and sort of funny, that he was saying that to me!). But I think I learned in that moment (combined with the long, painful journey of Morgan's birth)that for him and I, labor was/is equally difficult for us both, just in different ways.

I found myself sort of taking him in my shakey arms and telling him how I had been thinking about what a gift labor really was. And I meant it. I told him it was an opportunity for us to experience a little more about a few things divine.  I told him it was a little like our own journey through our own atonement. (Him, like Heavenly Father, and me in Gethsemane.) And that by going straight through something so impossible, conquering and coming out on the other side, there would be life -- this tiny, precious life. And he would be ours.  

I had to walk alone. And he could only watch. There's the strongest parallel there. And it's been so powerful for us both to realize that.

Everyday since June 17th, I've thanked my Heavenly Father for our experience. I'm thankful for two babies to love, for arms that are full and for being given the opportunity to taste so fully something so bitter and something so blissfully sweet.

It is beautiful to me.