Grandchild is the perfect gift

The email was waiting for us the morning before Christmas.
As I was reading it, my wife was checking her phone. She’d turned it off the night before and left it on the kitchen table. She found a text message that arrived before the email.
Keep in mind that 2013 has been, in some ways, a scary year for email. It was back in April that we awoke to learn that much of the shootout in Watertown, Mass., in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing was taking place just outside our daughter Maggie’s apartment building.
So you get a little leery when you click the mouse.
“Slow progress but steady,” it said. “Mike is here with me.”
The subject line: “Still at hospital.”
The text message on Connie’s phone shed much more light. Daughter Emily — who was due to give birth to our third grandchild on Dec. 29 — let us know a little after midnight on Dec. 23 that she and her husband Mike were heading to the hospital.
They’d contacted one of their great friends — Allegra, who conducts a large choral group in metropolitan Boston — to come over in the middle of the night and stay with their 3-year-old son Julian. Allegra would stay the night and wait until Mike’s parents arrived to take over.
The time between the text message and the email was about seven hours.
And that was just the start of the waiting.
Thrilled by the news that a grandchild was arriving, we celebrated at breakfast.
It’s been an amazing year.
Maggie and her husband Josh — after their Boston Marathon shootout scare — became the parents of a lovely daughter in August.
So this would mean two new grandchildren in less than five months.
Now all we’d have to do is wait.
And wait we did.
We waited all morning, checking email frequently and jumping whenever the phone rang.
We waited all afternoon, giving Maggie a call at one point to see if she’d heard anything from her sister.
She hadn’t, and we figured the one thing to avoid was calling Emily in the hospital.
If she’s in labor, we thought, the last thing she wants to do is field phone calls.
Our job was to be patient.
But it wasn’t easy.
As suppertime approached, I found myself thinking about all those movie montage sequences from the 1950s of expectant fathers in hospital waiting rooms. You know, the ones where the cigarette butts pile up in the ash trays, the clock winds around hour after hour and poor old Dad paces back and forth.
We were in the same zone, and it’s not pleasant territory.
After dinner, we started an informal pool. Daughter Sally picked 7:15 p.m. Her fiancé Ben picked 7:30 p.m. I picked 8:30 p.m. Connie — who, after all, was the only person in the pool to have actually gone through labor — picked 10 p.m.
And she was, at you might guess, the winner.
Word came through late in the evening that at 10:13 p.m. on Christmas Eve, Emily had given birth to an 8 lb. 8 oz., 20 1/2 inch-long son.
And — appropriately for Christmas Eve — his name was Gabriel. Gabriel James Veloso to be precise.
It’s difficult to imagine a more wonderful gift.
And while Connie may have won the pool, I think the whole family comes out winners on this one.
The only question for Christmas Eve in the future is how we’ll ever top this.

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