Day 12: My Girl

ELEVEN YEARS OLD! My baby is 11!

I did not find out the sex of any of my three children, so I remember going to work one morning and a coworker asked if my husband and I chose a name for the baby yet. Greek tradition is to name the first boy/girl after the husband’s parents and the 2nd of either gender is named after the wife’s parents. My boys are named after my father-in-law (John) and my dad (Andrew). So I explained to her that if it is a girl, we will name her Athanasia after my mother-in-law and if it’s a boy it will be Alex because we like that name. My coworker was aghast and said, “The boys have such special meaning to their names, you need to have a special name for the 3rd one too.”

Then the stress began because everything about this pregnancy was just like the first two, so I knew it was a boy. I even told my husband, “I hate that this one is a boy because everyone will think we found out even though we didn’t.”

Delivery was quick and easy. My mom was in the delivery room, as she was for the other two, and when she saw it was a girl, she thought to herself, Don’t say anything in case you saw wrong. Let the doctor make the announcement. Once the doctor told us it’s a girl, we called my sisters. As soon as they saw it was Pete calling they asked, “How big is he?” Imagine their surprise when he told them that HE is a SHE!

And from that moment on my beautiful girl has kept us on our toes. She loves her brothers with all her heart; she threatens me that my ranking is falling to 100 when I don’t let her have her way and announces that “Daddy is #1!”, but in the same breath asks when will I get home from work because she misses me so much. We snuggle, we bake, we read together, and we watch baking shows.

She is my best little girl, my best little friend, she is the light in all of our lives! Tonight we celebrated her by going to Wildfire and enjoying steaks and cake! Happy 11th Birthday my Sweet Beautiful Tessa!