“It’s a girl!” Headlines announced the birth of Her Royal Highness Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diana. William and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, were smiling as they left the London hospital with their baby daughter.

According to news reports, Prince William told the crowd waiting in front of the hospital to see the newest member of the Royal Family that he and his wife were “very happy.”

It seems like only yesterday my husband and I experienced the birth of our daughter. I remember the day the doctor told me I was expecting, the first time I felt the baby move inside of me, and eventually holding her in my arms. The joy is indescribable!

Jesus made an interesting statement about childbirth, “A woman, when she is in labor, has sorrow because her hour has come; but as soon as she has given birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a human being has been born into the world” (John 16:21).

It’s true, at least for me; the pain of childbirth fades from memory as time goes by. Though it seemed at times that I would be changing diapers forever, before long my daughter was a toddler learning to crawl, then walk. In just a blink of the eye, she was enrolling in kindergarten.

When your child goes to school, the years begin to fly. Elementary school, then middle school, and time accelerated through high school to graduation. When she went to college far from home, my tears flowed. On her bedroom door while she was growing up, she taped a sign that read, “Counselor – problems solved.” Interestingly enough, she is a licensed professional counselor. In a few weeks, she will be getting married. I will have new titles – mother of the bride and mother-in-law. I’m sure there will be tears of joy on her wedding day.

Poet Carl Sandburg has written, “A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on….Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo planes, don’t compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable.”

To the expectant mother, Catherine Claire Larson writes in her book, “Waiting in Wonder,” “God has chosen you for a sacred calling: to nurture a particular soul, exquisitely unique and immeasurably important. Our Father in heaven has handpicked you to mother this exact child, the one who began as a single cell, the one whose very odds of existence boggle the mind, and the one who will be so strangely like you and yet so strangely different.”

Jonas Salk is quoted as saying, “Give their children roots and wings. Roots to know where home is, wings to fly away and exercise what’s been taught them.” I am grateful to be Kelley Elizabeth’s mother. Watching her grow up to be a beautiful young lady with a caring heart has blessed my life.

Motherhood changed my life forever!