holding Anna for the first time.
Many friends can tell you that I have said one of my greatest fear is raising a daughter. It still is. There's so much that comes with being born without a Y chromosome that I'm still learning to navigate myself, and I worry that I won't be able to adequately help her figure out those same things. I would have loved another boy very much (his name would have been Emmett). I have a rule against saying that I'm hoping for one gender or another while I'm pregnant, but the night before our big ultrasound, I realized that, knowing three was our magic number, that if this baby wasn't a girl, I'd never have a daughter. That thought made me sad. After we knew Anna was coming, I confessed this to a friend, who said, "I'm glad the universe knew what you wanted before you did."
While we had the boys' names chosen before we were engaged, we've only ever agreed on two girl names - this comes from being married to a teacher. Chris mentioned the name while we were watching Sweeney Todd, and Anthony was singing "Johanna." Knowing we wanted to use Josephine as a middle name, he said he really liked Anna. It felt right, and it stuck.
The process of adding her to our family was a tricky one. There was a year of fertility medicine, then we decided to take a break, and apparently the drug has a decent half-life. Then the pregnancy proved that three children really would be enough for us. Trying to parent through feeling terrible is a difficult task, especially when it goes on for most of nine months. She was born half an hour before her brothers took the stage in the nativity ballet, after a long night and morning of will we or won't we be having this baby today. Then she spend a few days in the NICU while her blood sugar gave her some trouble. All of this complaining leads me to say, in hindsight, that it was a frustratingly beautiful process to bring her into the world. Three hours after her birth, there was a parade two blocks away from the hospital. It seems fitting.
She's much smaller than her brothers, and it still surprises me to look at her. That she hasn't grown out of her newborn clothes, and that she has needed them at all, amuses me. She's pretty good at jumping right into the crazy and going with the flow- until she isn't, and then her brothers come rushing to her aid, quick to offer kisses and consolation. Several times a day, Colin comes running through the house, which such a duck face, you'd think his lips were stretching to reach for her cheeks the moment it occurred to him that she ought to be kissed. Aggressively affectionate, we call it.
We're settling back into life, with Chris back to teaching and Aidan back at school. I struggle, trying to figure out how things have to work with the demands of a new baby, but everyone is pitching in, and helping out. Having her here feels like putting the last piece of a puzzle in place, and I'm just starting to sit back and see how it looks completed.
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