• Family,  Motherhood

    Receiving the Gift of Newborns

    Pure gift… words I dared to utter about our new babe. We named him Nathanael, which means “gift of God” because, after all, after loss and waiting, it’s harder to take the gift for granted. The first time around, I was so overwhelmed by all the newness that it took awhile for the magnitude of the gift to really settle in. So, this time we are acutely aware of what has been given to us.  Gifts can be funny though. Sometimes we receive gifts we don’t want or didn’t ask for. One year when I was teaching middle school religion, a family gifted every teacher with a bottle of wine…