My daughter H Frances Reeve was born on March 15, 2012 at 1:11am. She was 8 lbs., 8 oz. and 19″ long. It took 52 hours to get her here. I spent a full week in the hospital from beginning to end, but I wouldn’t change a single thing.

Today she is 1 week old, and I’ve never been so in love. The cliche about forgetting what labor was like once your baby is born is kind of BS. I haven’t forgotten a single minute of it, I just don’t care any more. It’s not forgetting the experience, it’s finding it completely irrelevant once you’ve got that little bundle in your arms. She looks at Adam and me like we’re in charge, like we must know what to do because who else would? That is a crazy, sometimes overwhelmingly huge sensation. The total trust and dependence. Between my insane hormones and recovering from a c-section Adam has been a total rock, and I can say with total confidence that I could not do this without him. He has his girls’ backs, and we’re a pretty tight little family already.

I won’t pretend that my photos can hold a candle to Adam’s photos, which is why he is the official baby photographer of the family. But I took these photos during our first night alone together in the hospital, the day she was born:

The day she came home from the hospital, March 19th:

I would step in front of a train for that face, without hesitation.

Life is really, really good.