sweet juniper!

Juniper stayed at our house with both her grandmothers during the twenty hours we spent in the hospital. My mother is completely deaf in one ear, and Wood's mother is completely blind in one eye. I'm sure there were enough hijinks and miscommunications to fill half a Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder movie, but everything worked out great in the end. Though, to be honest, I don't know how they managed to find their way through Detroit to the hospital (I sort of tuned out the story after the second middle-eastern gas station attendant behind bulletproof glass gave them bad directions). Six or so hours after the boy was born, we heard Juniper's voice as she entered the room: "I've been waiting for this day for a long, long time!"

I was there, ready to photograph the moment she first saw her brother:

After nearly ten minutes of jumping around the bed in excitement, she snuggled in for a hug:

She would still be holding him like that if we hadn't cruelly pulled him away from her, you know, just to "nurse." An hour ago, she sat in my lap as we rocked him together, singing her new favorite lullaby. He was asleep before the third verse.

And yet in seven or eight years, no doubt, we'll be driving somewhere and I'll have to slam on the brakes and pull off the road because she just can't stand how he's looking at her like that. And then when I ease back into traffic I'll tell her about how sweet she was to him on the day he was born and she'll roll her eyes and think I'm lame. And we'll both be right.