This girl, right here, fills my heart with joy. Sassy is the shaker of all things stable in my life. She pushes me to go places I didn’t know I wanted to go, sends me on daily adventures, tests my limits, and inspires me to crush my goals. She is the reason I smile. And it’s important to me that she smiles every day.
Sassy was a sweet surprise shortly after my (no ex) husband and I got together. She brought a special spark to our relationship that we didn’t know we needed. Shortly before she was born, our family relocated from Upstate New York to Southeast Texas. I left my 9-5 desk job at a hospitality company to drive across the country (while pregnant!). We had no friends, no family, and no connections in the area. I was pretty sure I would die alone.
But after she was born, I discovered a beautiful group of local Mamas that saved my sanity and brought purpose back into my life. Unlike stereotypical “mom groups”, this group’s mission statement aligned with evidence based parenting. Aka, they put science before “we did it and they survived”, but also strongly promoted attachment style parenting (and provided the evidence based research to support it). Many months later, I am now able to fuel those friendships as a work at home mom, without the pressures of returning to the monotony of a traditional 9-5 job, and can focus my heart where it matters: with the ginger haired baby who changed my view on the world.
I am able to inspire her to set goals beyond her perceived limitations, teach her important life lessons through play, and participate in an active role in her upbringing, instead of relying on traditional childcare.
Why Gingiecakes? And who’s Sassy?
Your name is the foundation of your identity, and we spent months looking for a name with meaning. I decided early on that if the baby ended up being a red headed girl, she would be named after my late grandmother.
When I started including her in my blog and on social media, I wanted to protect her digital presence as much as possible. I don’t want her to Google herself as a teenager and find fifteen pages of photos of her as a child. This in mind, I am very limited in the photos I post, and also decided to use a digital nickname.
She was born as a ginger, and my nickname as a kid was “Katie Cakes”. So “Gingiecakes” was born as her initial social media name.
But alas, as her personality began to bloom, this name didn’t last long. Pretty soon I started referring to her as “Sassy”, which is so much more fitting. She is my Sassy girl, my gingie cakes, and the center of my world.