Debra Pickett

So, while there is a party planned for Saturday, Monday will be a relatively quiet day for McKayla and her family. There's preschool in the morning and maybe a visit to the Riverwalk, near their Naperville home, in the afternoon. They will not attend the planned ceremony at the town's 9/11 memorial, but might stop there later in the evening to pay their respects.

"We will probably never have a children's party on her birthday," Mary says. "It just doesn't seem right."

It's a delicate balance: trying to preserve a happy, vivacious child's innocence about the world for a few more precious years without leaving her completely unprepared for the truth.

'I promised her joy'

Mary Montgomery was all checked in at Edward Hospital that morning, waiting, along with her husband Robb (a former Sun-Times employee), for the caesarean section that would deliver McKayla. "I don't know why we turned on the TV," she says now, "just passing time, I guess."

They watched the second plane fly into the World Trade Center. Then Robb went to find a nurse.

"I don't care if the whole world is blowing up," he remembers telling the stunned hospital staff, gathered around a television in a nearby lounge, in an effort to refocus their attention.

Then, they went into surgery.

Later, they found out about the attack on the Pentagon.

That night, Mary remembers, she was alone in the hospital with her baby girl for five quiet hours. Robb had run home, pressed into last-minute service to host New England relatives whose flight to Las Vegas had been diverted to O'Hare.

"I just stared at her," Mary says, "and I was crying with joy that she was here. I didn't want to know anything else that was happening. I just looked at her and I promised her, no matter what, that I'd try to give her a happy life. It was such a sad day, but I felt that I had to do that for her. I promised her joy, even though I didn't know how I could really give that to her under the circumstances."

Mary has managed, for the most part, to keep her promise.

Princesses and rainbows

"Her world is princesses and fairies and rainbows," she says of blond, brown-eyed McKayla, who loves painting and coloring and gymnastics. "She is an extremely happy child. She doesn't walk; she skips."

"I do walk sometimes," McKayla retorts with a slightly exasperated tone that promises an interesting adolescence.

Still, there's a certain sadness about being born into a world where your bag has always been searched before you go into Disney World, where you have never been able to greet your daddy at the first moment when he gets off his plane from a long business trip.

It has been said that having a child is the greatest possible expression of optimism. But these are not necessarily optimistic days.

"Do you feel safer now than you did then?" Mary asks me, as we watch McKayla choose a blue crayon for her coloring because she knows it is her mother's favorite color. "I don't mean to put you on the spot. I'm just asking. Because I don't know."

"Of course not," I want to say. I'm utterly convinced that times are far more dangerous now -- confiscated shampoo bottles notwithstanding -- than they were on Sept. 10, 2001. But admitting that feels wrong, especially when I'm weeks away from bringing my own baby into this frightening world.

For her part, Mary says, ever since McKayla's birth, "Part of me is always looking for the exit."

Maybe that's what parenthood is in these times: keeping an eye out for the fire exit, even as you teach your child to skip through the front door.