Happy Birthday, Emily!

Happy Birthday to my oldest daughter!

I became a real, actual mother the day Emily was born.  She was the first.  Not the first try, but the first arrival.  She beat our second wedding anniversary by three or four weeks.  Her daddy had to go take the bar exam and missed her debut--that story for tomorrow.  My mother had to take me to the hospital, and my mother had to take me home when they decided to discharge me a day early, because he had left for Idaho Falls to go through the temple with a cousin who would be leaving for a mission.  One of the doctors, a woman, asked me if I really had a husband who could be counted on; I said yes.  Definitely.

She weighed 8 lbs. 9 oz. and was 22 inches long--they had done an X-ray a couple of weeks earlier, and that upside-down baby spine seemed to go on forever, it was a trifle unsettling.  She grew up to be 5'9", so the tall bit continued.  I had had severe anemia, borderline toxemia which had put me on complete bed rest for five weeks, and a blistering spreading rash which had put me on the dermatology clinic rounds and made me the miserable debate subject of the day-- with no firm answer except that they decided not to do a biopsy.  It could have been from the drug the other doctor insisted I take for the pre-eclampsia, which I hated.  Those blisters drove me out of my mind.  But it was all worth it.  Colic later, and everything.

Here she is at home, one week old. 

2 months old

Here she is with me at the age of two months.  We were determined not to end up with pictures of the first child and few of the later children, so we set a schedule.  We pretty much kept to it, but some have more 'off-schedule' photos than others, depending on funds and cameras.  See that patch of long hair at the front top of her head?  All the other long hair fell out, except for the finest short stuff, and my jest was that she grew bangs and nothing else for a year.  But by 18 months, she had a good head of hair.

Emily in Seattle, age 18 months

 
She walked early, before she was nine months old. That was in fact her third method of locomotion, crawling being her second, because she was able to turn herself over from back to front (which is the harder way) as well as from front to back, by deliberate choice, at four months of age.  I knew this was early, but I didn't realize how unusual her response was to this capability: she recognized that it would get her from one place to another, and so she would roll, over and over, to follow me from one room to the next.  Loop-de-loop-de-loop across the floor.  Most babies will roll over to reach something they can see, but not keep going.  I've never seen another child, anyone's child, do the same.

age 2 1/2 or 3 at David and Bonnie's piano

 

This is the first picture of Emily at the piano, at my Aunt Bonnie's house, on their Steinway Grand.  We didn't have a piano until she was in the second grade, and we wanted to start her on lessons.  We bought a second car for that express purpose, too, because I had to have transportation.  She has a number of talents, but eventually she would choose a double music major at BYU, both piano performance and pedagogy, and I got to make the trip to hear her senior recital.  After she was married, she went back to school and earned her master's in music education.  In between, when she gained national accreditation as a piano teacher, she was only the fourth in Provo--two of the other three were BYU faculty.

She always had a sense of presence beyond her years.  She always has been intent on helping.  When she was five, if she came and asked me if there was something she could do for me, she would be upset if I didn't have any ideas.  (An older friend of mine asked, "Do kids actually come that way?  Mine didn't!")

gorgeous senior picture!

Eric fell in love with her in high school, and they married when he returned from his mission.  We had the opportunity to be with him when he went through the temple--we knew he was meant to be part of our family, it was only a matter of timing.  He didn't even live in our school district, but he attended our high school on a waiver, because of the availability of the International Baccalaureate program in Tacoma. 

She writes a column for the Nauvoo Times, as I do, you can find it here , called "Raising the Rising Generation."  She's pretty amazing.


Now she is waiting to deliver her fourth child (a girl) any day, and I will be taking off in two weeks to be there.  I'm looking forward to it.  I get to be Grammy as well as Mom, what more could you want?

Emily and Eric at Jonathan's wedding