After high-tailing it back to Canada for a hastily planned three-week holiday (and enduring a slightly exhausting travel schedule that found me taking a five hour long night bus to Manila, a plane to Seoul, a fourteen hour wait at the airport, a twelve hour flight to Toronto, a one hour flight to Ottawa, followed by a five hour car ride back to Toronto a day later), I was rewarded earlier this afternoon at around one p.m. when I was introduced to my brand new niece at the North York hospital in Toronto, a five minute walk from where my parents spent a year or two in their early twenties and a short car ride away from where I spent my own four years at York University, and the baby is named, eloquently enough, Annabelle Christina Spencer, born approximately an hour or two earlier via ceasaran section after quite a lengthy build-up.
The wait was worth it.
She is small and tiny and looks just like babies are supposed to look. (Only prettier.). Her behavior impressed me, I have to say. If it were me, and I had been floating, chilling, hanging out in that wonderful warm womb for a good nine months and change, and then I suddenly found myself thrusted into this colder, brighter, scarier universe where all of these creatures of various shapes and sizes suddenly fondled me with monstrous hands and shiny white teeth, I'd be freaking out. But the kid actually seemed to enjoy it.
Half Chinese (but all Spencer --and no, I'm not sure what that means, either), I predict young Annabelle will be quite the stunner. She's already considerably cute at, what, eight, nine hours old. Just think what the future has in store for her.
So, much, much, much congratulations and good cheer are extended to the new father (my older brother, Ted), the new mother (his wife, Elaine), her younger brother, Jason (my new fellow uncle), the proud grandparents, the proud great-grandparents, as well as the friends and family that are all equally ecstatic.
Quite a day, and quite a cool welcome back to Canada.
I wonder what tomorrow has in store...
