Babies!

So last Saturday, we three who comprise Lightwheel had a meeting, did some stuff, etc. Monica, quite pregnant, had reached the stage of perpetual discomfort. Once she bounced up and down on the balls of her feet, instructing the kid "Get out!" We all had lunch, and arranged for her last visit with us on Tuesday before her due date swooped upon her.

Never happened. Monday morning, around 12:30, the smoke detector in her bedroom went off. Wasn't the sort of thing where the battery is going low so it beeps periodically: it all-out went off. No fire anywhere, no smoke anywhere. She and her husband Kent got up, got the device to stop screeching, and went back to bed. Half an hour later it went off again. No one knows why--the device had no history of false alarms. But a couple hours later, she awoke Kent again: the contractions, they weren't stopping. And so off they went.

We've started calling the device a "birth detector."

Little Madeleine Anne was born later Monday morning, and on Thursday Marc and I went over to meet the newest member of our little Lightwheel family. An adorable child, as you can see, and remarkably mellow: not a crier at all, I barely heard a peep from her during the hour or so we were there. Monica is tired but resting and recovering; her first child, Alexander, has already declared he's "tired of being a big brother," and Kent was a mixture of pride and weariness. Madeleine, meanwhile, just laid there, being passed from person to person with complete equanimity, her huge baby eyes taking in absolutely everything without any sign of fear or anxiety. A perfect child in a perfect world, while we filled in her mom on all the things that had gone on in the perfect world during the days when she wasn't paying attention.