Hannah is 21!

Parabens a Voce Hannah! Nesta data querida!

No forgetting number 21 at the Tombs! Happy, I think, that you are still on the team. Shout out to my devoted fans, Allie and Lindsay--thanks for not letting her get 21 marks on her arm...

I traveled to DC for a pre-birthday bash amongst the somewhat faded cherry blossoms a couple weeks ago. Had fun watching Hannah do what she does--row, bike, walk, study, sleep, work, eat, not in that order. Here is Hannah with her free birthday Georgetown Cupcake of the day--Cookies and Creme--right before she keeled over and fell asleep after getting only a few short hours the night before.

Last nite on 60 minutes they had a piece on post-Loma Prieta earthquake rebuilding of the Bay Bridge. Twenty years ago we lost some of our more delicate wedding gifts to that rocker when Hannah was only 5 months old. Here they are, twenty years later, still rebuilding and fingers crossed they will complete this "quake-proof" bridge before the Hayward Fault slips again, any minute now. (Last time it slipped - 1868. Average time interval of slips - 140 years. 140th anniversary - 2008. Gulp. This is not a good time to relocate to Berkeley, thank you Stanford for rejecting Christiana...) Of course, not a good time to be living here on the Oregon Coast either. Plate tectonics are a bitch.

And all this while that the bridge building has continued, Hannah has been living her life. She was born to us naive newlyweds of only 6 months confirming her grandmother's sage warning, "The first baby can come any time, the rest take nine months." We lived in a third floor walk-up in the Sunset district, built on sand, not a great foundation for quakes. I delivered Hannah naturally, pushing all 8 pounds 7 oz. of her for an hour and a half with enough force to break my own tailbone, speaking of plate tectonics. Ouch. Afterwards the nurse and doctor both informed us that ours was the first natural birth they had ever seen. What? I had no aspirations of martyrdom. Especially around 8 cm. All those Lamaze drop-outs, who knew? Hannah paved the way, pushing that pesky coccyx aside, making me wish I still walked on all fours as I crawled around recovering, vowing "Never again," and going on to deliver six more babies who did, indeed, take nine months...

So, we cut our teeth on Hannah, our perfect first child. She was so happy and easy and made us feel like the best parents in the world. So successful. So competent. She sat on the floor and grinned at everyone and everything, content. No hurry to crawl. No rush to walk. She quietly went about her life doing great things and making no fuss about it. "Goody, goody Hannah," her grandmother called her when she potty-trained her with a pack of gum. And she was.

Happy Birthday Hannah!

Love,

Mom
XOXO