It’s a Girl

On the day I came home from the hospital — the Martha Jefferson hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia — my parents dressed me up in a white dress and blue sweater-and-cap set. (See the very first post on this blog for a look at the same outfit, worn by Delphine on the day she came home from the hospital.) When they got home, my parents put me down in a wooden cradle my father had made for me, cushioned with an afghan my mother’s aunt Zoe had made and a quilt my mother had sewn. (The first and last quilt she ever made, she says.) Then they posed for a photo.

I was one week old; back in the day, as they say, post-C-section babies and their moms stayed in the hospital way longer than they do today. Delphine, Caleb, and I were granted a whopping three full days.

Since we have the same cradle, quilt, and afghan, Caleb and I decided to replicate the photo — minus the groovy 1970s duds my parents were wearing on that March day in 1975. And since Delphine was asleep, we didn’t bother trying to wrestle her back into her coming-home-from the-hospital outfit.

In the 2009 photo, she’s about two weeks old. And yes, she likes snoozing in the cradle just fine.