Time to tell Grandma

Turns out, Meredith told her kids, your cousins Sarah and Lindsay. The kids are five and three. Meredith and the kids are going to visit Nanny, which means unless we tell Nanny first, she might find out about you from a three-year-old.

So we told her.

She's very excited.

And since we can't tell one grandparent without telling the others, we called my mom and dad, too.

My mother was excited and happy, but my father was absolutely giddy. Has to do with primogeniture, mostly. I'm the eldest son and the only person likely to pass on the Belefant name. My cousin Peter still lives at home, for all practical purposes, and isn't likely to produce heirs. My brother has sworn off kids, although he's really excited to be an uncle.

The only other Belefant who can produce offspring was Helen, who doesn't count because 1) she's a female and 2) she changed her last name when she married Gordon.

I know this was totally unexpected because at my advanced age, he'd pretty much resigned himself to the family name dying out, so this is something of a gift to a man for whom this means an awful lot.

And I'm glad it makes him happy.

Don't worry about pressure on you, though. I've kind of blazed a trail of doing the untraditional and if you feel like changing your last name to Butterworth, he'll adjust.

He won't like it. But he'll tell himself that you're a Belefant.

By the way, he hopes you're a boy. I kind of hope you're a girl, partly because I was a really angry teenager and I don't know if I could handle a son like me.

Your mom kind of would like a son, partly because everybody is telling her you're a girl.

This is what you're being born into.