Aashya, the summary!

Progeny comes from the Latin word progignere, meaning "to beget", or "to give rise to". And this is exactly what it feels when you give rise to your little one: your feelings, your life, your world, and the bigger purpose all just seem to rise up! I find the notion of "rising" particularly interesting because it connects two states of existence, the one before and the one after the rising. And again, this is exactly what our progeny brings: it starts from the remnants of the past (people even match their body parts with the newborn) and goes into the wonders of the future, sustaining the continuity of change and progress. A small new life in the world, but a giant leap in the lives of the family.

We were blessed with a baby girl this morning, or in the terms of British royalty, "Mansi was safely delivered of a baby girl at 9:38 am today". It was a planned caesarean birth and things went as professionally efficient as they could be in this modern world. In spite of being aware of these efficiencies, we spent a nearly sleepless night yesterday and a restless nine-month period before that. No matter how much routine the child-bearing process becomes, giving rise to a new life is still a huge event. There are a number of choices to make and a number of new complications arising each day. The standard medical phrase for this is that each patient is different, and that literally makes it seven billion possibilities. Given all of these, we were super relieved when things went zipping through and within one hour we had the baby in our arms.

Hospital services have really come of age and it's amazing to see the professionalism at work. Right after we checked in Evergreen hospital at 7:45 am, the nurses and other support staff were working with a robot-like precision yet with human empathy at its best. Their preparation work took 1.5 hours and Mansi was in the operation room at 9:15 am, exactly as scheduled. I was with her in the operation room, and even there, a perfect synergy was evident between various people each handling a specific job. The baby came out in about 30 minutes and the anesthesiologist made us see the baby popping out of Mansi's belly --- not a very pleasant sight of blood everywhere but a great experience as an after thought. Once the baby was out, things went even more quickly and they wrapped up Mansi's belly on one side and cleaned up the baby on the other. Finally, by 10:15 am we walked out of the operation room, Mansi in her stretcher bed and baby Aashya in her crib bed. As soon as we came back to the room, Aashya's pediatric was already present to check her while Mansi's doctor was at work with her. Things went in a flurry throughout the day with doctors, nurses, and other support staff working in a perfect tandem towards the end goal. By evening, Mansi was up on her feet and Aashya had already finished multiple cycles of feed-sleep-pee, all thanks to a great hospital and its staff.

When we found out about the second girl, many people made jolly comments about handling the tantrums of two girls. We already witnessed the first glimpse of that, when Aashya was crying inside the room and Aakhya was rolling outside in the hallway. It was an interesting situation where I couldn't ignore either and yet I couldn't be in two places at the same time. We will now need to cope with two kids, who will compete for our undivided attention. But kids are not just liabilities, they are assets as well. They are the building blocks of a family and a unit of happiness in so many ways: happiness in sharing and caring for each other, happiness in growing and learning together, happiness in surviving the ups and downs of life, happiness in enriching values that we together stand for, happiness in creating shared memories that last lifetime, happiness in the love that exists between us and that transcends life and death, and happiness in the way older identities are carried forward and newer ones are forged through innovation and rigor. With Aashya, we dream of all these happiness to add to our family in the times to come.

I will conclude by raising the following toast to Aashya:

New meaning
New hope
New beginning
New rope
Tying up our world together
Our tiny little isotope!


Welcome to your family and may you create your own world!

Cheers!
MAAA