Well, I spoke too soon in my last post about her sleeping well on her birthday. Not an hour after she went down, she was back up and stayed up until nearly midnight. Next evening, almost as bad. The night before her big day, she was up until 2:00 AM. Not because we let her stay up, but because she could not be induced to sleep earlier.
So apart from the sleep angst, Saturday ended up being a very good day. In the morning we had her nontraditional christening down by the lake, and in the afternoon we had her local first birthday party. Gaz was fussy in the morning and didn't nurse well at all until much later. She was pretty difficult until things got underway. Our good friend Greg officiated and pulled together some amazing readings. The theme, inspired by a quote from Mary Popins Comes Back was remembering and learning, or maybe relearning. Everyone brought little gifts that were symbolic of a hope or blessing that was wished for Gaz, and they were wonderfully thoughtful and creative and I'm still completely blown away. I mean, not that I ever doubted the creativity of our friends and family, but I had no idea what to expect. A catalog of these items will happen one day.
I don't think I can offer a fair description of the, and the video is lovely to peep but has terrible sound. I guess you had to be there. When all the readings have been collected I'll put something up here. Or somewhere. It might end up being a bit long. The long and the short of it is that it was beautiful, it was everything we wanted and more, and Greg almost made me cry at the end.
Then mad rush to get home, get food, get Gaz to nap (didn't happen except for the bit she slept in the car), get decorations up, get cupcakes (red velvet and confetti) set up, and get ready for people and presents to appear. And so many of our friends stopped by to partake of the cupcakes and to help us celebrate (again) Gaz's birthday. Some truly amazing presents were received, among them a couple of knitted nautiloids, a ton of clothes (thanks Grandma Cel and Aunt Hillary!), many wonderful books, a doll she immediately took a shine to, numbers and letters to play with in the bathtub, and so many more things, my brain cannot think of them all now. A big giant blanket thank you to everyone for showing up, for being so generous, and for being part of our extended family. We love you all! And thanks to the tissue paper we wrapped our gifts in, there's glitter everywhere, including on Gaz. Even after a bath.
After such a long week (I was working through all the horrible baby-won't-sleep nights, in addition to party planning and ceremony pondering) I can't claim to be all that coherent here, so feel free to email or comment with requests for details and I'll try to either edit this post or do another, spiffier one. I can pretty much guarantee that there will be more details on the ceremony later, though. Greg is typing up the readings we used for us. Wonderful, nerdy readings. Ursula K. LeGuin and Mary Popins and some guy who's poem I call the space prayer, but that's not what it's really called. But it should be.
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3 comments:
if you're referring to the same piece i think you are, i will spill the beans and say it was definitely a "space prayer:" it was from babylon 5, and the "some guy" was the character j'kar. godmother-lady edited it to take out all the world-specific bits.
didn't you see my squinched-up face trying to keep myself from going "ooh! ooh! i know where this is from! this is soooo perfect"...well, no. you were somewhat preoccupied. ;)
No, that's not what we were calling the space prayer. The space prayer was the poem that Mark read. What with all of its science bits I started referring to it as the space prayer to differentiate between the other prayer items we were considering.
But yes, the thing Angeli read was from Babylon 5, with the space bits taken out of it.
oh! well that one was cool too. but then the whole ceremony was pretty damn cool, if you ask me. :)
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