Eight is Great!

Phoebe's eighth birthday portraits - She's always had a baby face, and I love that she still has dimples on her knuckles, but this crazy phase of grown up teeth mixed in with empty spaces and baby teeth is a telling sign that she is growing up. Eight years ago we were spending as many hours a day in the hospital as we could arrange with her birthmom, the hospital and the adoption agency. We were worried about all the rules, her birthmom's emotions and Phoebe's baffling health concerns. The fact that 9/11 had just happened was too much to process in the NICU. We just wanted to bring her home and sort it all out later. We wanted to take her to doctors of our own choosing, not the ones the hospital assigned. We wanted to show her off to our family in person, not with stacks of photos that all looked the same (because how many different angles can you take of a sleeping baby?). Maybe our paparazzi style introduction to photography is what caused her to hate the camera for years. Thankfully she seems to be somewhat more tolerant of it in recent years and we are able to record the smiles, the looks, the moments that make her who she is. I never knew such love until the day she was born and it grows year after year, if that's even possible.