Aria Leigh Baldinger-Williams

On Saturday, June 16th at 10:50 pm, Aria joined our family in the touchable, squeezable and oh so lovely flesh. Sitting down to write this post, I am challenged. It's hard to find the words to describe the hugeness, joy, awe, love and thankfulness that we feel.

So instead, the details...

I was in a hotel room in Sacramento by myself when my water broke. It was 3 am on the morning of Friday, June 15th and I was planning to participate in a two day meeting Friday and Saturday launching the next phase in the textbook project I have been working on. What is that they say about the best laid plans...? Anyway, after a couple of phone calls and some deep breaths, I drove back home. We spent the majority of the day Friday and that night at home, packing the birth bag, timing surges, resting and being excited.

We checked into UCSF around 11:30 am on Saturday. We lucked into the most asked for of the labor and delivery rooms. As the nurse pointed out, it's the one in the brochure. Here are some portions of our view.



So we settled into our beautiful room, everyone expecting us to be there for quite a while. After a number of surprising twists in the process (ask me more if you want to know), Aria was born unphased just a few hours later. She weighed 6 pounds, 8.8 ounces at birth and was 19 inches long.

Here she is just a few minutes old. At least, here's a portion of the left side of her face.


As you can tell by the clock on the back wall, she's about 24 minutes old here as she and her daddy engage in mutual admiration.


Here, she's a whole day old. We were nervous to flash her little newborn eyes, so we don't have many pictures of her face head on.

Here she's cuddled up with a blanket made by Mommy. If you enlarge the photo, you can also see the little birth statistics card on the hospital bassinet.

We came back home midday on Monday the 18th. Riley (now Uncle Riley) and Evie's mother (now Nana) had come over and organized and cleaned, so we had the lovely surprise of being able to bring Aria home to a spotless house. (We'll see how long that lasts.)

Here is Aria testing out her little rocker chair, which she seems to like pretty well, though not as much as Mommy's or Daddy's chest.



Here she is with Daddy in one of her rare bouts of wakefulness. She's wearing a little undershirt that I wore when I was approximately her age. Thanks to Nana for all the wonderful antique baby clothes, many of which were hand and home made.

Here's more mutual admiration. She and her daddy like to stare at each other.

How could anyone possible resist that face?


This is how Aria and Mommy (and the cats) spend a lot of their time. It's really quite lovely.


Yesterday, Grandma came to visit. Aria was mostly doing what she does best: sleeping.


As I went through pictures, I was shocked to find none of Aria with her Nana. Nana has been around a lot since we came home and has been an enormous help to the brand new parents as well as great love and comfort for Aria. We'll have to remedy the lack of pictures when she comes over again.

That's all for now. Thanks to everyone who has sent their congratulations and good wishes. I can't wait for Aria to get to know her amazing extended family and network of wonderful friends. We are all so blessed.