Happy, happy birthday, Maybelle!

I have become the old person who reminisces about her daughter's birthday. The whole, "Five years ago right now, I was in the hospital, waiting to be induced!" This morning I shared this with Maybelle, and showed her lots of her baby pictures--a tradition on the morning of her birthday. She ran and got a baby doll so that we could compare that "tiny, tiny baby" with the "tiny, tiny baby" on the computer screen. She was willing to acknowledge that the baby on the screen was Maybelle, but she seemed far more interested in identifying the other folks, all the folks who love her and were holding her in gentle, affectionate ways.

LH mercy, look at this person!  Because she has Down syndrome she spent an entire unnecessary week in the NICU (this, my interviews have shown me, is not at all uncommon).  Strapped up to machines and tubes--it was tricky even holding her, but we did.  And my mom drove me to the hospital every three hours that week so that I could rearrange the tubes and breastfeed her--with lactation consultants visiting and moving my boobs around in entirely casual and non-weird ways.  Go, lactation consultants!

Then she got to come home. And who was there the night she came to our house? Claire.  (I haven't used this picture before on the blog, so I figured it was time.)

A healthy, happy baby.  It looks like she was wrapped in a dishtowel, which would have been the right size.

Today she's huge!  People keep commenting on how tall she is, and they're right--a lot of five-year-old clothes are too small for her.  Long legs.  She got those from me.

She's a person who now routinely goes through my closet and pulls out my t-shirts to wear, which is why, in the video below, she's wearing a shirt so big that it's falling off her shoulders.


Birthday from Maybelle on Vimeo.

We've had an excellent birthday.  A house full of friends this morning, five boxes of cinnamon rolls from Wildflour (that's right, five boxes), and kids running around, screaming, and hitting each other with balloons until they were all completely sweaty.  At one point Maybelle took all six of her dolls (Lela, girl, girl, girl, girl, and Dora) and got in bed.  She needed a little down time.

My baby is five!  Happy birthday, Maybelle!