Our little rascal was about a year old when I got pregnant again. My desire was to have a May girl, but there was a glitch: while in my family girls abound, in my husband’s family they seemed to have lost the mold and there had not been a girl, nowhere also within his extended family, in 73 years. When I was wondering what the new baby would be, I was always told, “A boy, what else?”

My thought was, “I will love him to death, but will keep going for the girl!” “You have been warned!”, I notified my husband, expecting he could actually do something about it. The poor man almost collapsed at the thought of the couple of male sport teams we were going to create in the quest for a girl who would never materialize. Then for minor reasons I had to have a couple of medical tests done, and while giving us the results the doc inadvertently hinted that I might be expecting a girl. (We have never wanted to know the sex of the baby we were expecting.)

When the notion of the possibility that the new baby was going to be a girl hit him, my husband asked me, “What do we do with a girl?” There’s no need for special skills, really?! My parents had four of us, and finally a boy (one, the third baby after my second sister and I, had died in infancy). I am the eldest of the bunch and, since I was seven, the one who did with my dad what he would have done with a boy, while his son was still a baby. Also, my second sister and I never played with dolls, unless you consider the times we played cowboy and Indian and we used our younger sisters’ (“the girls”) dolls as prisoners.

In the countryside at the age of 12 I was driving the farm’s old, bitten up Fiat 500, with a weird ignition and obviously a manual shift, on the paths bordering the fields. My father, who in his youth had raced cars and motorcycles, and had scars to show for it, was as proud as he was worried when at 20 I got a Kawasaki 400*. Girls can do it all!

Interesting enough, the first comment that came out of my husband’s mouth, an Italian man who was soon probably going to be the father of a girl, was, “I will have to start my collection of guns!”

*My Kawasaki was great fun and I felt so cool driving it in Florence until during a summer, to avoid a truck coming towards me on a narrow dirt road while at the beach (picture shorts and a flimsy top), I flew into a thick thorny bush, coming out of it looking like a porcupine. Note to self: the truck might actually have been the better choice!

I hope you all enjoyed a festive July 4th!