Baby Daisy Jo
Susie and I found out she was pregnant with our second child the day before we left for Disney World in January 2023.
That’ll change the tone of a Disney trip, lemme tell you.
Few things can overshadow a trip to The Happiest Place on Earth with your almost-three-year-old who is eager to meet Mickey Mouse for the first time—but news of a long-awaited second pregnancy is certainly one of them.
Like many parents who find out they are due to have a second child, I not-so-secretly hoped that our second baby would be the opposite sex of our first. Given that Magnolia, our four-year-old, is a girl, I was sorta hoping for a boy, at least in those first days.
Mostly I wanted a boy for the variety, right? Any parents reading probably understand this. I’m not a super masculine man’s man who likes to fish and hunt and do whatever else manly men do. If nothing else I was just curious to see what a boy version of our genetics would look like!
With a baby girl comes plenty of princesses and pink and the like. And that’s all fun—I love being a girl dad. But having a boy, I thought, would be different and fun and exciting in its own way.
The variety was the daydream as I stood in line for character meet-and-greets and Mickey pretzels that week in Florida.
“Oh, so you want variety,” chuckled the Lord, “Different, fun, and exciting you say? I think I can arrange that.”
A year ago today we welcomed our Daisy Josephine into the world and with her we received plenty of variety, fun, and excitement, no maleness necessary. She and Maggie seem to be about as different as two sisters can be, at least for the moment.
We do not lack for variety, lemme tell you.
The Lord fulfills hopes of our hearts in his own way, to be sure. And I couldn’t be more grateful for the way he fulfilled mine in baby Daisy Jo.
It’s hard to know what your kids will be like when they grow up when they are still so small, but even in light of her energy it is clear that Maggie Grace has inherited some introverted tendencies from Susie and me. She can bounce off the walls with the best of them, but she has told her friends and family multiple times, “Please leave me alone. I just need some time to myself.”
Maggie (mostly) does not struggle to spend her rest time alone in her bedroom each afternoon, listening to music or podcasts while playing with Magna-Tiles or LEGO.
Miss Daisy Jo on the other hand—I frankly cannot imagine a more extroverted and exuberant one-year-old. Now, of course, I don’t want to typecast her—and truly the Lord only knows how she will grow and change over time—but as of this moment, Daisy has never met a stranger. Everybody seems to get a wave and a smile, and to be alone is to be sad.1
And while she hasn’t appeared to inherit my more reserved personality, Daisy has managed to inherit my looks, at least when she flashes her signature cheesy grin and squints her little eyes.
As many have said since the beginning, “Maggie is Susie’s twin, and Daisy is Chris’s twin.” For now, this holds true, but we’ll have to see if it stays that way.
Last year, I shared a bit about how we decided to name Maggie “Magnolia,” and that it was a bit of a process. Naming Daisy was definitely more difficult. A boy likely would have been named something like Theodore Joseph, but just as we didn’t have any girl names immediately in mind for Maggie, we didn’t have any new ones in mind when we found out we would be having a girl.
Susie and I went around and around on names, which usually looked me listing off a bunch of names that came to mind as we drifted off to sleep every few nights last spring. I remember mentioning the name “Daisy” early on in our conversations, but we moved on to other options before Susie brought it up sometime in the summer, a few months before the baby was due to arrive.
I like the name Daisy and suggested it for a handful of reasons. I didn’t realize it at the time, but one of the main reasons was probably because of the character Daisy Ramirez in John Green’s book Turtles All the Way Down, which I read sometime in 2022. In the book, Daisy is the best friend of Aza, the protagonist. Daisy is bubbly, blunt, and outgoing. She’s the spunky, kick-you-in-the-pants kind of best friend that Aza needs. I’m just putting together right now as I write this how much our Daisy seems to already reflect that possible subconscious influence for her name.2
Daisy’s first word was “Da-da,” which was obviously fun for me and made Susie roll her eyes—but Maggie’s first word was “Ma-ma,” so she got that one. Much to Susie’s chagrin, though, Daisy will say “Da-da,” “Na-na,” “Ba-ba,” “Jo-jo,” and “No,” virtually on command, but will only muster a desperate “Ma…maaa” in the form of a moaning cry on her own terms.
This first year of Daisy has been so much fun. Susie and I are sad that our youngest, and perhaps last, baby is not so much of a baby anymore. But man I can’t wait to see how much Daisy continues to grow into her bubbly personality this next year.
I think what I have learned most as a parent in Daisy’s first year has very little to do with who Daisy is and more to do with what it means to be a parent of two little girls.
With Maggie, especially because her first year was spent mostly in some severity of a pandemic lockdown, I was able to maintain my sense of self. I wrote one-and-a-half books as a parent of one. I had more time for hobbies. It felt like parenting was one of many aspects of my life, I guess you could say.
Becoming a parent of two with Daisy’s arrival a year ago today has required me to die to myself in ways that being a parent of just one didn’t. I have trouble writing for this newsletter as a parent of two, let alone doing much book writing. I have far too many hobbies and interests for how little time I have now. Having two little girls has, in a very healthy way, made it unmistakably clear how much my role as a father is central to who I am with a certain ferocity that being a parent of one simply didn’t have.
And it’s great, even as much as it can be difficult sometimes. I’ve just had to learn and be reminded of what it means to die to myself, to find joy in the small and even stressful moments of parenting two little girls. I’ll have plenty of time to read and write and do whatever else in a handful of years when they’re teenagers and probably want a lot less to do with me than they do now.
Until then, I’ll keep trying to die to myself so I can find joy in the variety and enjoy the gracious provision of the Lord in his love for us.
I cannot say I relate.
Her middle name, “Josephine,” is a nod to my middle name, Joseph, which is my dad and his dad’s first name.
My 3rd child said ma-ma first as most children do, yet once she said da-da she refused to say ma-ma. "Say ma-ma," we would say. "Da!" "Say ma-ma-ma." "Da-da." Once day when she was around a year old, she was crawling around the nursery as I was doing something at the changing table. I suddenly realized she was babbling, "Ma-ma-ma-ma." We looked at each other and she stopped. I scooped her up and nursed her. When she was done, she popped herself off my breast, looked me straight in the eye, and declared "Da!" What a little tease, I thought. At such a young age! Well, she continued to be a tease, our most fun child, and a true daddy's girl. She is now 27 and married to a young man very much like her father in many ways. I have 2 girls and they are as different as night and day.