This morning we went up to Mlada Boleslav, where my wife’s sister lives. She’s got 3 kids and the oldest is about the same age as our youngest. The youngest is 4 months.
A couple of times a year, the town hall of whatever town you’re in has a ceremony for all of the newborn babies. Welcoming them to the neighborhood.
Picture borrowed from the internet, but that's pretty much what it looks like
The town hall is always a lovely building. It is amazing to me. Such a small country and yet they’ve got castles, palaces and stately government buildings all over the place. And other buildings that just look like that. Apartment buildings. Schools. There’s one place I really like to point out when tourists are visiting me in Prague. If you look across the river to the castle and cast your gaze to the right, in the lower corner of Letna Park, you can see a building with an onion dome, like the Kremlin, and it is lit up at night and looks absolutely magical, so I ask my tourist friends what they suspect it might be. (a. it’s a hot dog stand).
But I digress. It’s actually a rather dull ceremony, some lady reads out of a book, my Czech’s not perfect but basically welcome to the neighborhood, we look forward to seeing you grow up and hope you are smart, nice and beautiful and have a wonderful life, what else can you say? There were a bunch of 8 or 9 year olds reciting something badly and a slightly older girl who sang a couple of traditional songs and I actually thought she was pretty good. The parents all get a certificate and there’s always at least one baby who starts crying but it wasn’t bad this morning (just one kid was probably scared by the singer) and I just enjoyed looking around the room, the painted ceiling, angels in the clouds, and it was kind of nice – this is as close as I get to ever going inside a church.
It’s totally secular, it’s the town hall, but there is something sacred about babies and new beginnings and the continuation of the human species and hope for the future and all that stuff. So, welcome to the world, babies. Thanks for a lovely morning.
www.gurukalehuru.com 
This is truly lovely, celebrating a new life and knowing ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. Why can’t humans just respect and love each other simply because we are all….human….and all have the same needs ? This ceremony, without any ‘religious’ motives, is a start in that direction. The buildings sound beautiful. Speaking of ‘Domed’ buildings, have you visited St. Petersburg, Russia or Turkey ? The Eastern Orthodox churches and the Islamic Mosques are so beautiful in Eastern lands.
I’ve been to Istanbul and saw a lot of the mosques. Russia is still on my to do list.