Say Cheese...

My daughter's first moments ex utero were celebrated with a rather large welcoming party that included not only me, Tim, and the panel of premature-birth specialists, but also my mom, dad, two sisters, three digital cameras, and at least five camera phones. At one point, I asked the doctor if he normally had that many people watching him. He laughed and said, "Well, most women don't want this many people watchingthem give birth. And I've never had this many cameras in the room. I feel like a rock star."

We met dozens of nurses and doctors during Squiggles' stay in the NICU, and usually they would say, "Are you guys the ones from Boston?" followed by, "and you're the ones who had all those people at your delivery," followed by, "and everybody had cameras?" My favorite was, "And one of the cameras had, some kind of, like, Tupperware attached?" (It was a filter, Lance tells me.)

Cami shot this short video a minute or two after the birth. My favorite part is Karen squeezing in to take some shots. Lance's Tupperware camera makes several appearances.





At one point (unfortunately not in the video), the NICU nurse (who was prepping my daughter to be put on oxygen support and to be taken to the intensive care unit) apologized for being in Karen's way. She smiled and said, "No problem," as though she were completely accustomed to emergency personnel interfering with her photography efforts.


I'm so delighted that we have so many awesome pictures of my daughter's birth - some of them are gory, but... well, I like gory. For more pictures (and a long narrative that is far too long and boring to read), see my baby blog. I was also happy to have all those people in the room - it was a fun party, and made it less terrifying to give birth with all that support around.