Isaiah's magic shirt

Here is Isaiah in what we call his magic shirt, so named because of its apparent inability to be outgrown. The tag says 3-6 months, but he is 16 months now and it is just starting to get too short in front.Twelve years ago, when Luke and I were two giddy newlyweds expecting our first child half a world away in Italy, we were huddled together over the sluggish internet connection in the RA office at Due Santi, doing some online shopping at Baby Gap. We weren't going to find out the baby's sex (much to the shock and horror of every Italian we tried to explain this fact to) but we decided to order this shirt and a little sweater vest "just in case." We both had a hunch baby #1 would be a boy. Then Lili was born and I packed the little shirt away, thinking, "maybe next time." 

After daughter #3 was born and I packed up her baby clothes, I almost gave the little shirt away, since I was by this time positively convinced we were going to be a family of all girls...like the Bennets, or the Marches, or the Ingalls. After all, if anyone fit the feisty, second-born-of-a-house-of-daughters mold cast by such literary greats as Lizzy, Jo, and Laura, it was my Audrey. I am still kind of hopeful/terrified that she will someday write a book about her childhood and skewer us all. But I digress.

I decided to pack the shirt away one more time just in case. So it was there in its plastic wrapper ten years later when Isaiah surprised us all by being a boy. I REALLY was convinced he was a girl, so convinced that I found it annoying in the midst of contractions that my midwife kept calling the baby " he." It just goes to show that you never know what (or who) God has in store for you. I'm still a bit surprised that, twelve years later, we have a son to put into that magic shirt, a little mischief-maker whose eyes match its particular shade of blue perfectly, and who has rolled around in the grass and ground bananas into it until it is battered and stained. I'll never be able to get rid of it, and I'll probably be pulling it out and weeping into it when Isaiah is a big stinky teenager. It will always remind me of how surprised I was when God gave me Isaiah.

And boy, was he ever worth the wait!