I got married at age 28, and didn't have my first child, a girl, until the age of 33 and a half. I thought I had married late - most of my college classmates and friends of a similar age married before me.

But that first daughter, Elissa, didn't marry until she was 36, and had her first child, also a girl, at 37 and a half. So adding it up, including the two halves, when my first grandchild was born yesterday, I was 71.

The picture to the left shows her when she was only a few hours old.

Elissa grew this child, although she expressed some mystification as to how she did it. Following along in a book on pregnancy, she'd say things like, "I'm growing elbows this week", but it didn't seem to take any particular concentration on her part. So many things have to happen for a child to develop that it seems difficult for it to all work properly, yet it does so most of the time.

Whence the name? Elissa is a biological anthropologist, and her husband Ryan is a historian, and an amateur paleontologist.

This event will change my life, and Margie's, as well as Elissa's and Ryan's. Like Elissa, we've been preparing. For example, Margie and I took a course in infant and child CPR (Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation).

Below, a few pictures to get you started - I'm sure a lot more will appear in the future. Most of the pictures in this entry were taken by my younger daughter Sara, who was present during the delivery. The exceptions are the picture of Sara herself, which I took, and the last picture, which is not a picture of Darwin, but rather a baby picture of Elissa, her mother.

 

Note 1:   As an infant, Elissa liked baths herself. Her first two-word sentence is legendary in our family. She spoke very early, starting to produce single words at about ten months. One Fall day, when she had just passed her first birthday, I was carrying her around the Christopher Columbus Waterfront Park in downtown Boston (she had tired of walking). She stared at the harbor in front of us, a boat basin about 125 meters (400 feet) across, surrounded by stone walls. And then she said, to nobody in particular, "Big bath".

I've previously told this story in my blog entry Kids say the darndest things.   [return to text]