Laura Knudson and I became acquainted earlier in calendar year 2014 for professional reasons at the University of Minnesota, and somehow it came up that I construct puzzles whereas Laura is an avid solver.  We hatched the idea to use a crossword puzzle as a birth announcement, something that I have done previously for others (click here, here, here and here for examples).  However, there was an immediate problem—Laura and Peter had yet to decide on a name!  Moreover, they had elected to wait until the day of delivery to even learn the baby's sex. The best they were able to do was to share with me a short list of finalists for both girl and boy names.  Since our construction process requires several days even under the best of circumstances, this represented quite a challenge! My solution: to encode the name by putting a CIRCLE (47-Down) around certain letters in the final answer grid, a trick that I had learned from none other than Will Shortz and Michael Shteyman back in 2006, with respect to Just for the record, our proposed answer grid for the other gender outcome is shown belw.  Obviously, the instructions would have been different, i.e., After completing the puzzle, go to the square (which is circled) that has the number 2, and trace out a an approimate ellipsoid by following the circles in counterclockwise order until you reach the square that has the number 5. Read the circled letters in order, and you will learn the name of this puzzle's hero. Oh, BTW, had the baby been a boy, we were prepared to change the clue to SON (63-Down), although the clue currently used winks at another puzzle. 

Finally, I am proud to say that the new Knudson baby shares a birthdate with my own beloved daughter Deborah, who marks her first quarter-century this year.  Click here for a puzzle I wrote about her a year ago, for her 24^th birthday.

If you want to tell others about this particular page, refer them to http://tinyurl.com/breakingwatersolution