Happy One Month Birthday, Elia! 18 days in the NICU make it feel like this is our second week with Elia, not a full month – our due date was January 18th, Elia was born on December 19th. As recounted in previous posts, the hardest part was seeing her only a couple of hours a day.
Elia was 4 pounds 8 ounces when she was born, and at her month’s doctor’s visit she will be around 6 pounds (5 pounds 14 ounces the week before). Elia has out-grown her preemie clothes and is wearing newborn outfits now. Our favorites are the Mickey and Eeyore ones (the Eeyore has a tail in the back).
Just like with Curie, we are posting monthly collages with every day for the first year – those of you interested can watch Elia grow with us. On our website we include a family picture, on Facebook we collected those at the end of the first year.
Before Elia was born, Albert would joke about the second child – that he would just reuse the pictures of Curie and tell Elia that it was her (actually Peter at Duck Chang started that joke), the reality is Albert has not stopped taking the picture a day – you can call it insanity or dedication (or “insanication”).
(Why does Elia’s collage only have an ultrasound in the beginning? Confession time: when Albert was putting together Curie’s first month collage he forgot the 18th day, he didn’t forget to take it, he just forgot to put it into the collage. You can count it, 32 slots, three taken up by pregnancy test, ultrasound, and monitor; September so 30 days, there had to be a missing picture. So here we have Elia’s, December so 31 days, that means only one free slot, hence just the ultrasound (though we have the other two). Why didn’t Albert ever fix it? If you have ever been to our house, he blew up a 24 x 36 of the collage which hangs in the stairwell, and it would be a lot of work to redo it. Now the truth is known.)
We are out of practice at being new parents, but we try and the sleep deprivation comes back like riding a bike – (wait, we meant parenting comes back). Elia is eating well both from bottle and breast, poops a lot, sleeps a lot, and burps a lot, all part of her job. Elia smiles a lot ,and did so from the beginning – as early as the second day. There are a few hours of awake time where she loves being on her tummy (we burp her face down on our palm, so she probably associates face down with feeling good). When she is not doing tummy time, she is looking around with wonder at the world or looking into your eyes, sharing time.
It’s 3 AM, Elia has just been fed, Curie is sleeping quietly perpendicular to the bed, you can hear the ice maker in the refrigerator gurgle, lights are low and the baby makes mouth movements as she dreams of eating – a smile passes her lips. Warm baby breathing against your chest, you think to yourself, “I remember this, I remember what this was like.” What is this? This is happiness.
