“Why does he smell so good?” my eldest daughter, Ophelia, asked. She and her sister had just arrived at the hospital to meet their new baby brother. Only a few hours earlier, as the girls were eating their breakfast of pancakes and chocolate spread, they had watched me tear through the kitchen and into the car. “The baby is coming!” my worried mother explained.
“I can’t believe I have a baby brother,” Ophelia said, holding him on her lap for the first time, and has said many times since. The joy this little human, whom we have named Octavian Robert, after my father and my husband’s uncle, has brought his sisters has been heaven to watch. A serenity amid the chaos has fallen on the house and all my anxieties about not being able to cope have disappeared. This is how it was meant to be.
