Two Weeks

Tiny feet with tiny socks

Two weeks ago it was Easter. Four generations of my family sat together in our hospital room and oogled this tiny baby in a dress her cousin had worn to my wedding and booties that I wore when I was her size.

It's been two weeks and...I don't even know. The days are a blur. The nights are a blur. Eleanor is doing all three of her duties with gusto. Eat. Sleep. Poop. I feel like that's all I've done too. My mom has been staying with me which is the only reason I've been able to shower, the only reason there is clean laundry, clean dishes, food in the fridge and the animals haven't revolted. She goes home tomorrow. I'm terrified. Thankfully J starts his 2 weeks of paternity leave tomorrow, so I won't be all alone just yet.

Of course, the end of those 2 weeks is the beginning of his first week long international business trip. He's going to Canada to learn how to do the job he just got promoted to. Bad grammar, but I can't think well enough to fix it. Anyway, I'll be flying solo for the first time ever with my baby, one month old. Yikes. Thankfully, "solo" actually means "with lots of help from my friends & family" so I'm not too worried. Worried, yes, because keeping a tiny person alive is a daunting task, but you know... there's help and there's hope.

But enough about me. You're just here for baby pictures. Eleanor is doing really well. Gaining weight and doing...newborn stuff. I take a million pictures a day of her sleeping. I'm not very good at sleeping when she's sleeping yet. Sometimes she gets her night/day thing mixed up and she's actually making tears when she cries. That's not fair. I thought I had more time before the real tears.

Cabbage Patch face

We call her "The Squnchler" most of the time, as she rarely unfolds herself*. I only really use her name when talking about her, and even then, I think about her as "the baby." She's beautiful and I can't stop staring at her. I can't connect this squishy, mostly sweet-smelling little person I spend my day holding with the baby I carried on the inside for 273 days. I also can't quite grasp that I'm a mom.

I guess the bottom line is that everything is normal. Eleanor is growing. I'm able to feed her from my person. I'm also surprised at how tiny she is. I know she's almost 9 lbs now, but all her clothes just hang off of her. Newborn stuff is baggy. 0-3 months is all long in the arms & dangly in the legs. She's only 20" long, and at her check up she was 50% for both height & weight, which makes her roundly average, but...she's tiny.

A rare moment of un-squnching

J & I spend time dividing up her parts. She looks remarkably like me as a baby. She has my fingers, or at least fingernails, complete with the cuticles that peel & snag on everything. She has light brown/dark blonde hair that looks vaguely reddish in the light, but not at all like my hair when I was a carrot-topped baby. Her eyes are the same color as J's, but that could just be because they're that newborn shade of blue grey. She's just the tiniest bit tongue-tied (which thankfully hasn't affected her ability to latch) and that she gets from her dad. Also, potentially his chin, though it's hard to tell with those cheeks in the way. Those cheeks she gets from me.

And this little whirl? No idea where that comes from

*Which is hilarious, since she sent most of her time in the inside insisting that the fetal position was for chumps.