Happy Birthday, Laura!

Sometimes you can tell a lot about a child's personality before they are born. The birthing process can be an indication of things to come. Some come into the world like gangbusters (what ARE gangbusters?) as if they can't wait to get started in life (Becca) or some so quickly and unobtrusively, you feel like you almost missed it (Allison).If you know Laura, it will be no surprise to learn that she came into this world at her own pace. She wouldn't be hurried. It didn't matter that with my previous two children (first births don't count!), I delivered them within 2 1/2 hours of getting to the hospital. This held true for the two births after Laura as well. So when we arrived at the hospital on November 7th around 8:00 am, Mark was in his suit, prepared to go on into the office in San Francisco after witnessing this 4th child's birth. However, Laura had a different agenda. She took her sweet time. The contractions spread out, so it wasn't a harder labor, just an inefficient labor. She waltzed into the world at 1:15 pm. I know that it irritates some of my other children, but Laura was a perfect baby. Her APGAR score was a 10. The nurse said she'd only seen one other 10, and that was a pediatrician's child. But more than that, she was an easy baby, an easy teenager, just an all around easy-going young woman. Her outlook on life is upbeat. She looks for the good in people and experiences. One year, when she was playing Little League Baseball, she went to tryouts by herself (it was at the school across the street from our house.) Tryouts consisted of them pitching three balls to you, hitting three high flies to you, and hitting three grounders to you. When she came home, this is the conversation we had: Me: How did tryouts go? Laura: Good. Me: Did you hit any of the pitches? Laura: No. Me: Did you catch any of the high flies? Laura: No. Me: Did you get any of the grounders? Laura: No.But she thought tryouts went well.... This makes Laura sound more unathletic than she really is. She's always up for trying something new. She played baseball, she was on the swim team, she played soccer, she took piano lessons, she took flute lessons, she took voice lessons (David thought she said she was taking BOY lessons), she did well in school. When Mark gave her a name and a blessing as an infant, he blessed her with a sense of humor. I was sort of surprised, I had never heard anyone do that before, and I remember thinking that she would need it in this family. I mean things were pretty chaotic with an 8, 5, and 3 year old besides her. But what I've come to realize is that yes, Laura has a good sense of humor (like the rest of my children), but with Laura it's more like BEING in good humor. When she was about 18 months old, I wrote in my journal: "Lots of people will tell me how good-natured and happy she seems to be - and she really is. Everything is a joke to her. I wonder what she'll be like when she's older."Interestingly enough, Laura was born a year and a day after my miscarriage. I felt like I had been pregnant an awfully long time and I had gone through morning sickness twice to get her. Was it worth the wait? I think so.