00:00 16 April 2012

“Happy Birthday Ira”
For the next so many years we will say this to you at precisely this time every year.
Ria is extremely excited about the new baby which is on it’s way into the world today. We will be checking into the hospital around 11:30 AM and the c-sec is scheduled for 3PM. It was very tough to put Ria to sleep earlier. She usually goes off by 8-8:30PM everyday but today was exceptionally supercharged for the poor kid. For the past 9 months she has been preparing for this day, well for the new baby. Earlier when we first told her about it her first reaction was to give the new baby her name. After a little bit of reasoning we arrived at a consensus “we’ll shuffle the letters of your name a bit and use Ira instead of Ria”. Then her toys and clothes started getting sorted into piles of “we can keep these for Ira” and “these we can give away”. Every trip out shopping (even for groceries) we kept being told “Ira would need this”.

Well long and short of it, Ira (assuming its a girl that comes out later today), is Rias baby and we are pretty much standers by. Hopefully it will be a precious little baby sister for Ria but even if it is a boy we are pretty sure Ria will be the perfect big sister looking out for the baby and ensuring we do everything for it better or at least as well as we’ve managed it for Ria so far. She would turn 4 in little over a couple of month and in a way it’s heart breaking to see her act all grown up while she herself is a bundle I don’t tire of carrying on my shoulders all the time. Well time flies. Hopefully we will be able to stay as attentive and as affectionate with Ria even when the new kid comes along. The fact that we’ve tried and build it up as Rias baby not ours should help ensure that the ownership transition will keep her engrossed and happy about any extra attention the new baby gets.

Ria has been a perfect kid, if the new baby is even as good as this one it would be just wow! Then again there is no doubt that it would be perfect considering the mom is still the same and this time Ria also is here to ensure that I don’t mess it up. The only thing I want to make sure of is that Ria should not grow up faster than her years just because there is a new smaller child in the family that is just unfair to the elder kid.

aaah well all is good, perfect infact and life will be just like this….. perfect for all of us. Another 15hours and then we know if it’s “Ira” or, hmmmm we didnt agree on a boys name but Sonali was keen on “Neil”, so lets see!!!