Baby Tiana Claire is here!

By c-section, Dec 2, 2008, 10:46am EST

7 lbs, 11 oz, 21" long

Short reddish hair and blue eyes.

It's a girl! Again!

I'm Amy. I'm 38 and had my third child on December 2, 2008. (If you ask my teenaged son, my husband Bob and I are hopeless perverts for "carrying on like that at our advanced ages".) There is a nearly-sixteen-year age gap between my oldest child and my youngest, which means that by the time the baby leaves home for college, we will have had children in our house for 34 consecutive years...! My husband and I have been together 20 years come November 2009. In addition to our three human children, we have three canine ones: Basil, the always-cheerful epileptic cocker spaniel (who happily responds to "Bubba", "Banana" or anything that begins with "B" at this point) and Hoover, an aging and exceedingly hairy shepherd/Yeti(?) mix named after our vacuum cleaner for good reason (I'm embarrassed to admit that, at pushing 90 pounds, she also answers to "Large Marge". As in 'big as a barge') and a cocker spaniel puppy named Snickers, or "Snick" for short.

It was a weird pregnancy. When we had our CVS testing way 11 weeks in, the genetic team ruptured our amniotic sac and we lost most of the fluid around the baby. It was a long recovery period, during most of which they thought the baby would die, but the tear healed over and our fluid came back! Our daughter Tiana was born happy and healthy with no complications whatsoever.

Tia is doing great, with a clean bill of health. She's robustly healthy, her current challenges being the inevitable-but-thankfully-temporary baby acne, and amusing amounts of noisy gas which send the men in this house into hysterics and subsequent competitions to match or outdo her. Oh joy. Makes me proud of the intellectual level we're achieving. I'm a nursing mom, which means I spend more time using or thinking about my breasts than one would otherwise believe possible, and I'm about to segueway off maternity leave back into a busy harp performance schedule.

The Name Game: When we named our son Alex, it was a pretty unusual name. But ten minutes later, it was THE hot name for both boys and girls alike. We vowed to go a little more offbeat if we ever got to choose again. And we did! (Having said that, it was on the news the other day that the first baby born in our city this year has Tiana's name, and apparently Disney has chosen Tiana as the name for its upcoming Disney princess in The Princess and the Frog, due out December 2009, so it appears we just can't win.)

My first daughter is named Aja (pronounced "Asia") Morgaine. Aja is a name with a lot of meanings in various cultures. I'm told that is means Joyful Energy in Hebrew, and is an African goddess of the rainforest as well as being an ancient Persian goddess of the dawn. The Koran says it is the name of the Egyptian queen who raised Moses. And it's a really kick-butt Steely Dan album, too, so it's musical. Supposedly in India, it's a boy's name meaning "goat", but we just won't mention that one to her... "Morgaine" is the protagonist from my favorite book of all time, The Mists of Avalon, by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Tiana Claire is the new baby; we call her Tia for short. In Russia, Tiana is short for Tatiana. In Cherokee Indian, it means "beautiful soul". In India, it means "princess". In Greece, it means "highest beauty". "Claire" is the protagonist from Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander" series of books (read them, or forever hang your head in shame...)

Special deliveries: In three pregnancies, I never did go into labor! My first baby was nearly three weeks late when they did a c-section because of his transverse presentation. My second was breech and big (and two weeks late prior to the c-section). And my third was a c-section just by virtue of having had two prior c-sections, and because her gestation had been so risky, I wanted to eliminate a hard labor and possible complications for her.