Baby M2.0

All my nieces and nephews are having babies. Or at least it seems that way. First, everyone was getting married. Now, it's babies. This summer I had the privilege of meeting a few more who had been born this past year. They are beautiful bundles of energy--just watching them was a little exhausting.

This sonogram is a photo of my niece and nephew's second baby, at the moment referred to as 'Baby M2.0'. Ultrasound images have improved remarkably since I had one years ago--now you can clearly see their little profiles or fingers or...well, you know.

When I was younger, I had my life-plan list: college, travel, marriage, babies. I wanted life in a neat package, and I expected to 'have it my way'. Of course, it didn't turn out exactly the way I had imagined it, but many of the things on the list I was fortunate to have been able to experience, including the birth of three remarkable children.

If you ask a woman who happens to be a mother what day was her most memorable, I'm sure most would say the day her baby was born. I would have to say the same. What a miracle birth is! How is it possible that two people can come together and create a new human being? And from the moment of birth, these little people have their own unique, individual personalities. If you have more than one child, even twins, you are even more convinced. They charge through the birth canal with their own 'life plan', and the adventure begins.

The womb, however, is not the secret place it used to be, now that ultrasounds can produce such detailed sonogram photos of the baby in the womb. But the fact that we can see images of the baby only intensifies the sense of wonder and awe of the miraculous event that is unfolding. The miracle is not that humans create a baby, but that God creates a baby and then breathes life and a unique personality into him or her.

I can't wait to meet Baby M2.0. I'm sure he or she is already making her life plan--and the rest of us, this 'tia' included, will just sit back and watch the adventure unfold.

"I praise You because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth." Psalm 139:14-15