my favourite picture

A friend once told me that she thought that for every baby born, there's a picture taken when although the mother looks disheveled from labour and the baby is puffy and purple, it is beautiful.

I never really felt that I had a picture like that. In fact, there were only 2 or 3 photos taken of me and Plava when she first made way into the world, and neither of them were very worthy of calling beautiful.

The photo above though, is by far my favourite photo of all the ones we have (and believe me, we have a lot). It's not a beautifully arranged picture, the setting is hard to figure out, there's a stroller in the background, and the subjects are off centre, but the emotion I feel when I look at it is overwhelming. I labeled it, "Laura loving Plava" (okay, I used her real name), and that's exactly what I see and remember when I look at it.

It was taken on the shore of the Okanagan lake when Plava was 4 weeks old, and when we were at a family reunion in which there were 5 new babies, Plava being the youngest.

It was a sunny day, and we had walked down the road from Baba's house with a handful of cousins and other babies to the trail that leads down to a small, rocky beach. We had strapped Plava in, tiny as she was, to our big off-road stroller and bumped along down to the water. Once there, we set out our towels and a bunch of people went swimming. I didn't go though - I was too enamored with my new baby, and I just sat holding her on the water's edge, enjoying the moment as she slept in my arms.

What a wonderful memory. I'll have to show Plava that photo when she's older and tell the story.