Happy Birthday, Christina!

Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday to my second-born, Christina.  She weighed only 5 lbs. 4 oz. and all the nurses joked that the four ounces was hair.  She had thick, dark hair, and it didn't fall out!  At six months her hair touched her shoulders--until her older sister, 2 1/2, decided to take the scissors to it and cut random chunks out of it.  I sat down and cried, a reaction which my Hubby found incomprehensible.  After all, it's just hair, right?  It's a mother thing, there's a wrench to cutting off the curls or whatever. (No curls in this case.)  That hair was just something that everyone remarked on, it was so fun, and then it was wrecked. The shortest spot was about 1/4 inch long, right on the top of her head.  I trimmed and shaped it as best I could, but I couldn't do much about that spot.  It grew.

Despite her size on arrival, she was way overdue, and I came to dread walking in the door on Sunday, to be inevitably greeted by somebody with, "Are you still here?"  When she was so small, they did a lung scan to see if everyone was wrong and she was in fact premature, but the verdict was no.  She gained eight ounces a week for the first five weeks, an incredible rate for such a small baby, and then got sick for the first time, and sick repeatedly and constantly all winter.  The doctor said when she missed the date on her first shots, wait until she has been over this for about ten days.  He eventually said, if there is a day when you think she is completely well, call and bring her in; her 'two month' immunizations were given to her at five months, as the first time she had a completely well day.  On her first birthday she weighed only 14 lbs. 8 oz. and was marked 'failure to thrive' because her rate of weight gain actually dropped after she became old enough for her own immune system to kick in and she quit catching and hanging on to every germ that passed by.  Careful monitoring proved that she simply had small size and late growth characteristic of one branch of her father's family.  She reached her maximum projected possible height (5'1"), which is good, because Hubby's grandmother was only 4'10" and that makes life a little more difficult.

Her father gave her a name and blessing in church as a baby.in which he blessed her with an early recognition of her talents.  That was quickly in evidence, as she was verbally very precocious.  When she started walking at twelve and a half months, everyone said, is she walking already?  Yes, she's a year old.  Gradually accustomed to not associating her age with her size, when she started talking in sentences, they said, oh, is she about two and a half?  No, twenty-one months.  She came in from the back yard one day with a cup, because the juice was drunk.  "Here, put table," she said to me, plunking it down.  Not quite two, I thought, about right.  Then she added, "I'm all finished with this now!" and ran back outside as my jaw dropped.  Not 'I done' or even 'I'm done' but 'I'm all finished with this now,' clear as you please.  When she was two, her favorite word for a while was 'magnificent.'  Not your typical toddler in terms of her vocabulary, and she's never dropped down to anywhere near 'typical' since.

We persuaded her kindergarten teacher to start her reading before the year ended.  That was all she needed to take off.  By the time she walked in the door for first grade, helped by the encouragement of the library summer reading program, she was reading at the 3rd grade level.   The challenge became how to find books which didn't bore her to death but were appropriate for her age and interests.

We called her Christie when she was growing up, but she decided that she was Christina when she was ready to leave home and launch.  Like most students, she received tons of college brochures in the mail; she went for an interview with visiting admissions staff for a school she only knew about because of their mailing, then accepted an invitation to a scholars' weekend, and fell in love with the place.  She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from that school, which doesn't exist as such anymore, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, in Lynchburg, VA.  It was a remarkable opportunity, and she has fast friends for life from her time there.  She spent her juunior year abroad at the University of Reading in the U.K. and also taught English in Prague for a year after graduation.

Christina (l) with Carole

Christina received an MFA from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, as the first Fred Chappell Fellow, and she is a published poet, also participating in several prestigious writing workshops.  She works at Vanderbilt University as the managing editor of a scholarly economics journal and lives in Nashville.

My scanner croaked while I was away, so the school pictures and baby pictures I was going to use I can't put up.  (The double one above, I think from kindergarten, was taken of the original by a phone, so pardon its imperfections. Others, that I might have scanned, were too small for that to work.)  She and her significant other visited recently for a Seattle wedding, and we went up and snuck half a day with her.  Here we are after King Tut, pausing on a sunny day, and we had a wonderful time.  (Boyfriend is taking the shot, so he's not in it.)  Wish we were closer, so we could see each other more often.  Happy day that you were born, sweetie.