(Here is the part where I forcibly restrain myself from caving in to Mommy Blog Syndrome and writing a gushing post about one of my children on her birthday.)

Boolie will turn three years old next week, and she really is a sort of miracle, because there wasn’t meant to be a Boolie. She shocked the crap out of us when we found out she was on her way.

Ben and I had planned to have children; we agreed that if we’d been younger, we’d want to have three, but given our age we would settle for two. It took us nearly a year to get a successful pregnancy off the ground — I had three miscarriages before Sam — but once we got going, we really got going. Matt was born 18 months after Sam arrived, and we figured we were done having babies.

But the “third child” was always lurking in the background. I was proud to have given Ben two sons, but a girl would have been nice. Still. I was 44 years old and it was no time to think about more babies.

Around autumn of 2004, my online friend Lisa (who refuses to blog, so I can’t link to her, dammit) asked Are you sure you’re done having babies? Because I dreamed of coming to visit your family, and you had a baby girl on your hip. I laughed and told her of course I was done having babies. But Boolie had other plans.

A pregnancy test came back positive on December 12, 2004, and Ben and I were shittin’ kittens. We spent the first 48 hours saying “Oh shit. OH SHIT!” but once we settled in to the idea, we sort of liked it. And of course we knew Boolie would be a girl. She was born just a couple of months before my 45th birthday, bright and healthy.

She’s amazing. Ben calls her the cherry on top, the finishing touch our family needed. There is lots of noise and chaos and mess associated with having three little kids, but we wouldn’t trade her for anything. Not even a little peace and quiet.

Happy birthday, Bool. I guess I gushed a little anyway, but you’re pretty awesome.