I’ll name that baby in four

Tamsin’s naming ceremony went really well: the sun shone (for only the second day this summer) – we even managed a barbeque in the evening without needing the emergency gazebo I’d bought – the children behaved impeccably*, the registrar was jolly, the flowers pretty and the afternoon tea delicious. Everybody looked very nice (though in an ideal world my hairdryer might not have broken down 10 minutes before we needed to leave the house – lucky I had a baby to distract people with, eh!). There are some photos here.

We had three lovely readings, read by Tamsin’s three lovely ungodlyparents (or whatever one is supposed to call them):  

Children, from The Prophet (Kahlil Gibran)

And he said:
Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you. For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth. The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far. Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness; for even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

A piece by Francis Thompson and William Blake

Know you what it is to be a child? … It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief; it is to be so little that the elves can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches, and mice into horses, lowness into loftiness, and nothing into everything, – for each child has a fairy god-mother in his/her own soul; it is to live in a nutshell and count yourself the king/queen of infinite space; it is:
To see the World in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

A wish for my children (Evangeline Paterson)

On this doorstep I stand
year after year
to watch you going

and think: May you not
skin your knees. May you
not catch your fingers
in car doors. May
your hearts not break.

May tide and weather
wait for your coming

and may you grow strong
to break
all webs of my weaving

*Apart from Maggie and Mia having a wee nibble of the cake icing, but who could blame them when it had such beautiful flowers on!

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 11:52 am and is filed under parenting, photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.