There are a lot of things having a new baby in the house makes hard to do -- writing this blog is clearly one of them. Yet I have so many fleeting thoughts throughout the day that I'd like to see what happens to on the page. Having a new baby somehow awakens the world around me in a new way too as if I, too, am seeing everything for the first time. I would like to write through the fog of the first weeks of Koen's life and how I had days of seeing through it clearly and days where the fog seemed to lift and fall all day day long. But there are so few moments when I have two hands to do anything.

Today Dietrich was picking at his peel-less apples while licking the peanut butter (into which he was supposed to be dipping) when he asked me to tell him the story of his birth. He watched my every word which made me reach for more details. It stormed that night, there were 28 babies born along with Dietrich and Elliott, we were so confused when who we knew to be baby B became baby A because, during my surgical birth, he was born first. He asked for it again, and again. When Ryan came home, he asked him to tell it so he could hear his version, his details. And then again, tell it again.

And then I heard the news, on facebook, that a professor from St Olaf died yesterday, too young, too much in the prime of his life, too great of a family to leave behind. The news of his death leaves a sting that reminds me the brokenness of this world runs deep. And so we need to tell the birth stories, the stories that give life and try even a little bit to describe that place where life happens -- not just the birth stories, but the times each day when something looks new or when we see something we've glanced before but for the first time really take a look, or give a listen. There are moments all day long ready to be birthed into our imagination and then told, and retold.