The cross-stitching, if done exceptionally well, is so fine it can appear to the naked eye as beading. There are five traditional patterns including an eight-point star, a snail shell, a ram's head, an elephant's footprint and a heart, which, when combined create a beautiful display. Women work all day in the fields and in the house and then sew by oil lamp throughout the night so that their children will have appropriate clothes for New Year’s. Hmong families usually consist of many children, fulfilling several crucial purposes. First and foremost, children guarantee the continuation of the lineage and clan. Children also provide helping hands for farm work, housework, and childcare. Being able to produce many children adds to a sense of importance for women, helping them feel a stronger sense of belonging within their clan. Children are also very highly celebrated in Hmong culture, as the Hmong people believe in reincarnation and center their lives around the family. During pregnancy, Hmong women carried out their daily responsibilities until the day they went into labor. A Hmong woman would follow her food cravings to guarantee that her child would not be born with a deformity. Once her water broke she would then walk to the nearest water source and carry water to her house to wash her baby when it was born. In the book "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down", Anne Fadiman discusses a woman who gave birth to twelve of her fifteen children alone in the middle of the night. The woman, Foua, delivered each child into her own hands in complete silence, believing that noise would "thwart the birth". The father then cut the umbilical cord and the mother washed her newborn. The father proceeded to dig a deep hole in the dirt floor of the house to bury the placenta. If the baby was a girl the placenta was buried underneath her parents' bed, but if it was a boy it was buried with greater honor under the central column of the house. The Hmong believe that after death a soul returns to its birthplace, retrieves its placental jacket, puts it on, and begins its voyage to the sky. Women had a strict postpartum diet that consisted solely of hot foods and drinks. Cold food would "make the blood congeal in the womb instead of cleansing it by flowing freely". These beliefs were closely followed to ensure the continued fertility of the new mother and her ability to produce enough breastmilk. A baby was not considered part of the community until a ceremony called the hu plig (soul-calling) occurred three days after its birth.