Birthday!

We celebrated Hels' 12th birthday over the weekend. She had all the girls in her class come for a sleepover out in our camper. They also went to see Prince Caspian. I don't have any photos to share because every picture I took is packed with her friends' faces. I guess that's part of turning 12--the friends come more to the forefront. Phew. It took me all of Sunday to recuperate from my very late evening of trying to get them to quiet down and sleep!

Her birthday is special to me--it's when Nels and I became parents. Her birth was just as I wanted it--with a midwife, in the hospital, bearable pain, and not too long :)


In her early years at the Waldorf, we came into school for her birthday. The teacher would tell the "rainbow bridge story" and then we shared a picture of her and told a little story from when she was a baby.

The story I told was of an event that happened about a week after we came home. One night I just couldn't get her to sleep, so I went out onto the porch to sit in the cool evening air and rock. As she quieted and occasionally made a little bleating sound, I heard another little bleating sound come out of the dark. And then another and another....the lambs on the field below us were quietly settling with their mothers just like us.

How Vermont is that? Sorry. No photos of the sheep!