Mark's Sample (Open Topic): What's the most beautiful thing I ever experienced?

The most beautiful thing I have ever seen is my son Michael's birth in 2003 and my daughter Mei's birth in 2007. I was just an observer. Megumi, my wife, did all the hard, painful work of a natural birth with no epidural anesthesia in both cases and I was privileged to be able to watch both of my children come out into the world and cry their first cry.

Mei and Dad

Both babies were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in the whole world, and as ugly as new born babies are...with their wrinkled red faces and (at least before their bath) covered with various fluids...my memory of the scene is the most powerful memory of happiness that I have in my mind. My wife Megumi also, as exhausted as she was after hours of labor, seemed to glow with beauty. The whole scene had a fuzzy warmth and brightness to it.

This is no doubt partly because of my relief after the birth went smoothly without complication and both babies and mother were healthy. But it is something much more than just relief. It is hard to express how much happiness came to me from seeing my kids born. You want to cry and laugh and just sit there in awe, all at the same time.

I have videos of the moment of birth of both kids and one day I want to take the audio of initial cries off of it and put it on my blog. That initial voice of a new born baby (when it is yours, at least) is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard.

I don't think that I have a blog article on this topic (except this and this, very short posts), so I very glad that I had a chance to remember and write about it. I think I have some materials from my son's birth on a computer backup disk somewhere, but it is definitely better to have everything organized and connected on one blog...