Yesterday, I wrote about waiting, including the wait for a baby to be born.  I didn’t know when I started writing how soon that waiting would be over.  Our first granddaughter has made her way into our world and  into our hearts.

Just 45 minutes past midnight, missing her aunt’s birthday, not to mention the day that will be long remembered in US history, Evy will have a birthday all her own. Sarah says that having “a birthday buddy” in the same month is just fine. Since we celebrate family birthdays each month—sometimes two, sometimes three at a time— theirs will always be together.  They can laugh in years to come and share the joke that they might have had birthdays on the same day, except that Evy came into the world in her own way and in her own time.

Evy begins this day to write her own life story, as storyteller Mary-Eileen McClear said in an email to me today, “holding out for her own birthday,” as her own daughter did some years ago, missing Christmas, New Year’s Day and her mother’s birthday. She continued, “Just as your daughter is starting a new life as a mother, you start a new life, too, as a grandmother. I am totally delighted for you. ” So have many others shared this delight with us already today.

My husband and I have been to the hospital to see Evy for the first time. Time to cuddle, time for her parents to share her birth experience with us, and time for us to witness yet another miracle in life. We give thanks for her safe passage, and thanks for this new small person who comes into our life and the life of her parents. We are doubly blessed.