One year ago, I was sitting in a hospital bed in Chicago for the sixth straight day when in walks the doctor. She made an announcement to my husband and me that has forever changed our lives:

“Looks like you need to have a baby today!”

It was precisely two months before my due date, but I had a brand-new full-blown case of pre-eclampsia and it wasn’t getting better. I was induced and had my very first baby girl later that night.

Evan Joy has changed our home and our world in all the best ways. We now have tights and hair bows among the crew socks and Superman underwear. Though I’m still not a huge fan of wearing pink and lace myself, about 90% of her wardrobe consists of just that (after having only three boys, our friends lavished Evan with a new girly wardrobe.)

Though we’re sure she’ll grow up loving baseball (like her mommy — and now her daddy) and helicopters (like her daddy and brothers), she’s already fascinated by dolls and babies. She’s calmed our house (even if just a bit) and made everyone more considerate and sympathetic.

She may be little still… after being born 9 weeks early, she weighed just 2 pounds, 12 ounces at birth and weighs just 13 pounds now. To everyone who meets her, she’s tiny, but to us, she’s huge. She’s come a long way in 12 months. She wears a size 1 diaper and 3-6 month sized clothing still, but she acts much older. Put her down and she immediately crawls off, pulls up on the nearest stable object and begins walking alongside it, occasionally letting go.

She has an attitude (at times) that we’re working on, but she can be ultra snugly and sweet. Her brothers still adore her, fight over who gets to help her, and try to teach her [strange] things. Soon, she’ll be the tiniest big sister I’ve ever seen, but if the past year is any indication, she’ll fly through that miraculously, too.

We know God has big plans for her. She may have spent the first month of her life in the NICU, but she had no medical problems at all. She was just growing. She still is.

She’s got her daddy enamoured (when she holds out her hand to him, he kisses it… This is the game they play over and over and over again.) She’s got Andy’s protection, Brady’s entertainment and Connor’s patience all on her side. And she’s got mommy’s gratitude for saving me from a house full of little boy smells.

We love our Chicken Little.

Happy 1st Birthday Evan!! 

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 11:59 am and is filed under Evan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.