It's a Girl!

It was the day before our fourth anniversary that Caryn leaned in with her elbows on the table at the Johnny Carino’s restaurant in Pearland and told me the news. She had a sly grin on her face and instantly I regretted not going to the doctor’s appointment.
“You know?” I asked.
Caryn nodded as my heart dropped down an elevator shaft and everything suddenly became real. The sounds of the restaurant disappeared, the clinking of plates, the waiter asking the table next to us if they wanted ground pepper, the low murmur of a crowd…all silenced.
Caryn had told me the other news first…the scary stuff. The test to determine the probability birth defects had come back. Typically women her age, twenty-seven, have a one in a thousand chance of Down syndrome. Her test indicated that she has a one in one hundred and forty three chance (less than 1%). Not high, but the doctor recommended an amniocentesis, a somewhat routine test of amniotic fluid-but is not without risk.
So we decided that we would research it and hold any decision off for another time. I thought about my former college professor, David Hurd, who has two twins that are confined to wheelchairs and who speak through a keypad on their chairs. I thought about our friend Becky, who has a child Ella, a beautiful girl with Down syndrome. I thought about all this and more as Caryn sat poised and ready to reveal the gender of our baby.
And I’m back to falling down the elevator shaft. The ride is amazing and uncertain.
“What is it?”
I said ‘it.” ‘It’ referring to the gender. Right?
Caryn has these amazing blue eyes that you can get lost in. She uses them to hypnotize me so I will take out the trash. The pepper waiter was moving closer to our table.
“We are going to have a baby girl,” she said.
A baby girl. A daughter. My daughter, the first female President of the United States. God Hallelujah!
Love, Daddy