Smile! You're Beautiful

We all take for granted the ability to smile, and to share with others our feelings through our facial expressions. Meghan is probably the best example in our family of a goof. When we were she had my phone for a few hours and took approx. 200 photos of herself. Things like her feet, nose and ears. Even a lovely shot of the inside of her mouth including her uvula. Nice. And a gazillion close-ups of her face making all sorts of expressions. I'll add a bunch of pictures at the end of the post for you to laugh at.

Around the world approximately 1 baby in 700 is born with either a cleft lip, palate of combination thereof. It's nothing that the mother did while pregnant but a defect in fetal development within the first 9 weeks of gestation that causes the 2 sides of the face to not fuse together correctly. Though some environmental or genetic components have been suggested there is still a lot more research to be done before anything conclusive is officially announced. I'm not being very technical about this, I know, but you get the idea without all the long fancy words. The point is, that if you live in Canada then it's a fairly simple thing to have your baby receive the corrective surgery when still very young, often a few months old, and to have it paid for by the health care system we all enjoy. But what if you lived in a developing country? I'm not trying to scare you into donating money to facially disfigured people, but I do want you to watch this short video for one reason, to see the joy light up a little girls eyes when she sees her new face. She's beautiful inside and out and to see the sense of wonder and understanding in her eyes is a beautiful thing to watch. And then after seeing this I'd like you to think about how much a simple smile can change the world for the better. A smile shared with another person can lighten their mood, improve their day, and it's such a simple thing that we in the Western World just don't do enough. We run about our busy lives keeping to ourselves and looking down instead of recognizing that we're all inter connected and that appreciating life's blessings and sharing a smile with a friend or stranger can make society better on a small level. What if 10% of people decided to smile more, wouldn't that make this planet a friendlier place? Anyways, enjoy the video.



And now for pics of the beautiful people in our goofy family. I love you all. Sorry they're not layed out very well, it must be that Animal shirt of Steve's that threw me off, lol. If you want to comment and can't seem to get it to work, please send me your comments to doulamum at hotmail dot com and I will add them manually for you :)