A Very Irish Girl

We have a new granddaughter. She’s our eighth grandchild and sixth granddaughter. I adore this child but we’ve come, in the six months she’s been here, to learn that we have on our hands a very Irish girl!

Both my side of the family and Andi’s (my daughter-in-law) are predominantly Irish. It’s easy to see in the red hair and fair eyes of most of the kids. I am what’s known as Black Irish (dark eyes and hair) and Pete falls between with his red beard and dark eyes. Andi is a blue-eyed blonde.

Our new granddaughter is going to follow the genetics of her red-haired, blue-eyed forebears. In Irish Gaelic, she’s a Is bean rua í. A red-haired woman. But her coloring isn’t all that is pure Irish. This baby is Irish to the bone.

We laugh at Lexie because she “gets her Irish up” in a nano-second. Even when she was barely a month old she’d get instantly furious if she wanted to eat and the bottle wasn’t in her mouth within a second. I once mentioned to her daddy, Pete, that she was really angry and he laughed and said, “No. She’s not throwing the fists of fury yet.” And he was right. Lexie would (and still does) ball up her tiny hands and swing them as though she’s in a title fight when she gets mad.

She also has a move that comes to her from me, through her father. When I was a baby, right up to my twenties, I’d rub my feet together furiously when I was angry. Pete was only a couple of weeks old when my father and I noticed he did the same thing. And now Lexie does it. With each hard rub of one foot against the other you can almost hear her saying, “I. Want. It. NOW!”

“Sometimes Mama calls me Spawn.”

This little girl knows what she wants, when she wants it and has no qualms about letting the rest of her world know. She can definitely be a wee devil. But she’s also the happiest baby around when she’s not hungry or tired.

Each morning I greet her by saying, “Good morning, Peaches!” I’m rewarded with the biggest grin possible for such a tiny face. She squeals and laughs and tries so hard to chat.

Like a faerie she’s enthralled both Remy and Henry. Remy wouldn’t even let her maternal grandfather touch her until recently. He places himself between the baby and any doorway so he can protect her from the Viking marauders he seems to feel sure are about to burst in. She can squeeze and tug on any body part and Remy just goes about with whatever he was doing. And Henry fell under Lexie’s spell when she bit him on the nose.

One thing she’ll have to work on to be a grown up Irish girl is her drinking.

She passes out way too easy after hitting the bottle.

But coffee the next morning gets her right back to her old self.

No matter what mood this very Irish girl is in she’ll always be precious.