I’m waking up out of a fog and into another this morning. In what has to be the coolest, mistiest, most autumn-like final days of July I can recall, I awake this morning and relish the quietness of a household on a cloudy Tuesday morning. I pull on socks—socks!—and briefly wonder where my fleece jackets are. Still strongly on my mind and embedded deeply in my heart are the events of last weekend; namely the birth of a wonderful and squeezy baby boy. Lauren had said she’d like to go into labor on Friday and have the baby over the weekend. And she did just that. I joined her and Josh at the hospital at 12:30am Saturday and entered that strange time warp that exists in hospitals. It feels too brief and not accurate really to state that little Judah was born at 5:29pm because somehow the hours between 12:30am and and 5:29pm unfolded themselves into a 300-page novel all it’s own. The clock ticked away as labor worked itself out in Lauren, but how does all the walking and the contractions and the pain and the love fit itself into one small day? How does the start of this new life make sense in terms of minutes and hours? You can see how I’m just now waking up from the fog of this experience; it’s not just the sleeplessness of one night that has affected me. I’m wrapping my mind around this incredible experience and praising God for his inexplicable miracles.

Welcome to the world, little Judah. You are a precious gift indeed. And though you won’t understand this until you’re grown and watching your own children being born, I can tell you one thing for certain: your mom is a rock star.