Today my third baby, Alyzeh Nasim, turns 1. A whole year has gone by since the midwife placed her, wet and warm, on my chest. A whole year has gone by since my family was finally made complete. And I am still not sure how this miracle happened when I had told myself I was giving up on it.

Ever since I was a little girl, I “knew” I was going to have 3 kids. Girl, boy, girl. When my husband and I got married, I think we both knew 3 was our magic number.

So, in the summer of 2012 when I got pregnant for the third time I took it for granted that this was just ‘going to happen’ and we’d have the family we’d always imagined. Until that dream was shaken by the loss of our baby at 11 weeks gestation. We were devastated, not just from the loss of a baby we would never hold, but because it felt like the end of our dream. My pregnancies are awful, at best. And the miscarriage left me with some physical challenges. There was no reason why we couldn’t try again, we were told. But I had a reason. I didn’t think I had it in me anymore.

We considered adoption and even talked to a couple people we know who have grown their families this way. But the conversations left me aching for my baby even more, and my husband and I decided that was enough baby talk. By this point, it was February of 2013. The pain of knowing my baby would have been born the next month coupled with the blocked feeling I got when we talked about adoption was too much for me, and I spent a 3 day period in a complete mess. I cried day in and day out. At the kids’ schools, at the gym…the tears just would not stop. I’d cry myself to sleep at night, too. After  3 days, I laid down in bed for what I thought was going to be another sleepless night. What happened next can only be described as being enveloped in a quiet and peace I had not experienced in a long time. It was as though every thought in my head was stilled. Every ping pong that had been bouncing around in my brain was put to rest. And I heard a voice from deep within me say, “I want to try again for my own baby.”

That voice calmed me and I trusted it with absolute certainty…

…until the next morning, when I woke up to regular old life and all the reminders of the pain I had been feeling. And the fear. There was no way I wanted to try again, I told myself.

A couple months later, I started dreaming about babies. In one dream, I was holding a newborn. The details were so vivid, right down to the baby acne, I was almost surprised, when I woke up, that it had been a dream. In another dream, my friend was holding two babies, one slightly smaller than the other, and looking very tired. Her two other children were jumping up and down with joy beside her. When I woke up, I texted her, “Are you pregnant?” Her reply, “How did you know??” sent chills down my spine. I probably gave her the same feeling when I texted back, “I think you might be having twins!”

The next day, a good friend of mine who happens to be psychic said to me, “So, baby number 3 is on the way.”

“What?” I asked. “Whose baby?”

“Yours.” she replied calmly. “And I don’t know what this means, but I’m seeing a Christmas tree.”

Mine? Couldn’t be. We were certainly avoiding the whole thing. But a week later, while I was sitting in a blogger conference, I felt the familiar tingling under the arms that I felt at the beginning of my three other pregnancies. My eyes practically popped out of my head and I turned to my blogger friend beside me, as though to ask, Did you feel that twinge? I mentally did the math. I should have been menstruating by that day. Whoa.

Later at home, a pregnancy test screamed two hot pink lines at me in my shocked state. In one moment, everything made sense: the heightened intuition (my friend was not having twins – one of the babies was mine!), the cramping I had had a few nights prior when I thought I ate something bad, waking up hungry at 3 am a couple nights in a row…

Was this really happening?

That was a question I asked myself for probably the first 30 weeks of my pregnancy with Alyzeh. Was this really happening? Was I really going to have this baby?

And, praise God, I did. She came to me, my baby girl, and I still can’t believe it sometimes. Today, she is a crawling, laughing, two-toothed little monkey who plays games, looks deep into my eyes, feels bad at the slightest ‘No’, and completes our family in a magical way.

Her first name, Alyzeh, is a Persian word for a type of wind. Her middle name, Nasim, was my mom’s name which means morning breeze. So, both names imply that she was brought into our lives by a force that we can’t see, but totally believe in.

And that’s the story of how Alyzeh came into our lives.

Happy birthday, baby girl!