Event - Sophia Rey Tiberius Pound, August 8th, 2017

I've been a bit preoccupied the last week or so, awaiting the arrival of a new person in my life. She was supposed to get here on August 7^th, but it turns out she's kind of a stubborn little girl, and she didn't make her debut appearance until August 8^th. It was worth the wait. You might call be biased, but from my perspective, she's perfectly adorable in every possible way.

Her impending arrival was somewhat unexpected and derailed all of our plans for this year and the next few years. Not that we didn't want a child - we did, but our trek to get here was a little bit circuitous and seems to have defied some fairly daunting odds. We decided to try for a child a couple of years ago, and went through the usual rounds of efforts, eventually consulting a fertility specialist. It turned out that we had some issues: I'm kind of old, and the redhead had some unexpected medical issues and our fertility doctor assured us that these combined to make it virtually impossible for us to conceive without medical assistance. We ended up going through a fairly common array of increasingly potent medical procedures intended to help the process along until we came to the point where we had said we would accept that it wasn't going to happen and move on with our lives. We were disappointed, but we weren't going to beat our heads against the wall endlessly.

Fast forward several months later, to the day before Christmas Eve 2016 and an incredulous redhead holding a positive pregnancy test indicating that we had managed to pull off what the doctor had said was essentially impossible. We had planned on maybe going to Worldcon in Helsinki this year. As you can probably guess, we aren't there. If we hadn't gone to Worldcon, we may have gone to Gen Con. We aren't going to be there either. We had planned on doing a lot of other things this year, and we haven't done them or won't be doing them because the million-to-one shot baby now exists. Sophia ruined almost all of our plans, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

As one can see from the picture, she's already contemplating taking over the world, which should only be expected from a little girl named for a character from a Diana Wynne Jones novel, a character from Star Wars, and a character from Star Trek. Yes, the redhead and I are just that nerdy: She probably has no chance of ever being anything even remotely resembling cool, but we'll see what happens when she gets a little older. I'm planning on calling her Jim. I'm sure that if the eleventh Doctor were here to speak baby, she would tell us that she has an entirely different name for herself, but since he isn't, we're just going to go with the names we picked out. Given the long odds against her existing at all, I'm pretty sure she's going to end up curing cancer or exploring Mars or something like that.

Right now mother and daughter are still in the hospital waiting the usual amount of time before they are discharged on Friday. Then our world will really change. Don't be surprised if I start reviewing the occasional book about Henry Huggins or Paddington Bear in the near future.

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