Fam Friday: Meet Esmeralda Valentine

There are nine children in my family.  My two brothers were born first and then seven girls like pretty maids all in a row.  The Glediator always tells me, "That's a lot of estrogen in one household!"  Dad saw to it that his girls were the basketball team he always wanted as a father.  Most of us were pretty athletic and played sports growing up.  But Amy was born with a poem in her heart and a dance in her step.  

When I was five or six she started a dance studio in her room for the three youngest little girls.  With a pseudo name like Donna Deluxe and a platinum blonde wig on her head, we were in make-believe heaven with our older sister, dancing around the room to Wham and Cyndi Lauper.  Amy's bedroom was fascinating to me as a child.  Poems were penciled on the wall, her switch plate covered in a collage of ABC gum wads, acid wash jeans lay on the floor and then then there was the sprawl of Wet 'N Wild cosmetics on the bathroom vanity.

During her college years, Amy studied art.  Found objects, salvaged junk, broken body parts from dolls, and mannequins, mannequins, mannequins were EVERYWHERE in her apartment!  

The beautiful thing about Amy is that she embraces who she is, never concerned with meeting anyone's expectations but the ones she has for her own hopes and dreams.  We're talking about a woman who once changed her name to Esmeralda Valentine, who has an open obsession with fecal matter, who once lifted road barricades (orange vest, helmet and all), a blacksmith by trade, married to a Brazilian body builder ten years younger than her, who at 35, just had her first baby boy (Enzo) earlier this week.  

"Poo is Art" - Amy at the Museum of Fine Art in Boston

I can't wait to welcome baby Enzo into this family of bubbling aunties.  

I want to tell him all about how his mother gives the shirt off her back to perfect strangers. 

How her work ethic rivals that of Paul Bunyan.

How she always tells the best jokes.

How our family would never be the same without her.