All I Want For Christmas

Is my two front teeth, Ella says. And she got them!


This picture was taken a little over a week ago, back when she was having teething pain. It wasn't too bad, she was a little more fussy than usual and we had to give her this homeopathic stuff for the pain and put clove oil on her gums. Now they're really in and they're not bothering her anymore. When we upload the pictures from this week I'll post a new picture (and some real Christmas pictures!).

Hope everyone had a nice holiday and got everything you wanted and were thankful for your two front teeth which hopefully you all had already!

Best thing ever

She loves this. It's a game that she understands and participates in. Plus it blows my mind with its ridiculousness. Enjoy.

Givethanksing

Thanksgiving started early for me--Ella was hungry at 6:20am, too close to my 7:15 alarm for me to go back to sleep even when she was happily snuggled with Seth.

Alarm on Thanksgiving? you ask. You know it! Had to get up early for the annual Feaster Five, the 5k I've been doing with my dad and various other people for almost a decade. This year my dad was sick and couldn't come, so I had to represent the Ellis clan with Shannon and our friend Erin (her first 5k!).

It was my first 5k post-Ella. I started running four weeks earlier and slowly (and I mean slowly) worked my way up to 3 miles. I finished in just over 35 minutes. Slower than I wanted to be, but it still feels good to be working out again and getting back in shape. In the spring Ella and I can start running together with our fancy jogging stroller.

Anyway, when I got home Ella and I needed a nap (it's tiring being a baby!)

Then we got Ella all dressed up in her Thanksgiving best to go to my aunt's house.












Nice bloomers, huh? This matching set came from the nice people who run the food cart at BU where Seth gets his lunch everyday. Isn't that sweet of them?

To get to my aunt's, Ella took her first train ride. Can you believe we hadn't taken her on the train in 4 months? That means I hadn't been on the train in 4 months either. Ella and I used to ride the bus together a lot, but she'd never been on a train. I think she liked it.

When we got there, Ella got to meet her cousin Jennifer for the first time and visit with cousin Adam and great aunt Ann and my family. She was particularly thankful for her grandma, as indicated on her bib--one of her favorite modes of expression.

After a delicious dinner we rode the train back home and went back to sleep.

A pretty good first Thanksgiving. I hope you all had a nice holiday too, ate some good food, and matched your hat and your underwear for the occasion.

Want to see something crazy?

\

Ella at 2 days old and again at 4 months old.

Can you believe how much she's grown?

Or is Seth shrinking? Think about it.

Anniversary of sorts

Just looking through the early posts, we realized that exactly one year ago today we learned that we were pregnant.
What a difference a year can make.

My 31st Halloween!

It was my 31st Halloween everybody!!

Oh yeah, and Ella's 1st Halloween. (ok, and technically my 32nd Halloween as Seth annoyingly pointed out).

We decided to go real homemade this halloween. Sure some people thought she was a bunny (she wasn't. she was a lamb), but who cares. Whatever she was, she was frickin' cute. See for yourself:

It's a homemade onesie with cotton balls glued to it and a little homemade hood.

Ridiculous.

Applepicking

Last week we took Ella apple-picking for the first time. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon. Ella slept the whole way there in the car. Then she was awake and alert the whole time we were at the farm. And she slept the whole way home. Perfect.

Here are the highlights:

Baby in sunglasses--stupidly cute!

A baby-sized apple she's not allowed to eat yet.

Little baby in the pumpkin patch.

Baby meets chickens (and bunnies, pigs, goats, but she likes chickens best)

Ok, so there were a lot of highlights!

Climbing Daddy Mountain

Every morning when we wake up we find this happy, playful baby in our bed who wants to smile and babble and play. It's a rough life.

All right, Mr. DeMille...

...I'm ready for my close up.

Doctor's Visit

A couple weeks ago Ella had her second doctor's appointment--the one where she had to get her first vaccine.

The doctor says she's a healthy little fatty who's growing stupendously. She was 12 lb 6 1/2 ounces.

The doctor is cute--when she made Ella upset by trying to listen to her heart, she leaned down and kissed her feet and said she was sorry. She also talked to us for a long time about vaccines. We wanted to get as few as possible. It turns out that they really bundle them and the one shot she ended up getting had 5 things in it: diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, polio, and influenza. We decided to wait to give her rotavirus and pneumococcal at a later appointment.

It was very sad. I nursed her while the doctor gave her the shot. When she got the shot she pulled her head back and looked at me with this shocked and sad look like I had betrayed her. But then she started nursing again and I think I was more upset than she was. Then we took her home and after a while she started crying this inconsolable cry for an hour. Finally, she fell asleep in her dad's arms. But even in her sleep she would suddenly start to cry every 5 or 10 minutes and without waking up she would cry for a minute. We would just sit there and look at her concernedly until she was quiet again. She was running a low fever for an hour or so, but after that she was fine.

Now we have to take her to get the other two shots some time before her 4 month appointment in November. Which we hate. But the doctor says she's perfect and we totally agree.

Nicknames

She was Scooter in the womb, but now that she's here Scooter just doesn't seem to fit anymore. That's ok, because we've come up with lots of other names. Here are some:

Ella-Bella
Jelly Bean

El-J

E L Cool J (One of our favorites. It stands for "everybody loves cool Jane")

Lots of things ending with "ella":
stinkerella
craperella (sort of a changing table theme here)

or with Ella in them:
Ella-phant
Ella-gant (more a compliment than a nickname)

And other names that have nothing to do with her name:

Monkey (because she makes a cute little monkey face sometimes)
Punkin pie (because she's a cutie pie and she's orange like pumpkin pie)
Punky (which is short for both Punky Brewster and Punkin Pie and conveniently rhymes with Monkey).
Little Gentleman (for when she wears her boy outfits)

And Daddy's favorites:
Precious Pie
Milk-Mouth/-Face

Playtime

Mommies and daddies have different ideas of what's fun:

Mommy funtime:


Daddy funtime:
(No babies were hurt in the making of this film!)



But one thing we agree on--do anything necessary to make Ella smile.

Grandmas, Grandpas, and Aunties, Oh My!

Ella got to spend the first weeks of her life with constant attention from two of her grandmas who continue to visit her on a regular basis:












But she's also had visits with grandpas and her third grandma:














And Aunt and Uncle Sarah:













It's so nice to have all her family nearby. She's also had visits from great aunts and cousins from near and far. And that's just her blood relatives. Ella is also the lucky recipient of adopted aunties and uncles (pictures to be posted soon!). Are you a relative (blood or adopted) who hasn't met Ella yet? Schedule your visit today! Repeat visits welcome!

1st bath, 1st shower

Don't worry, we didn't wait 5 weeks to give her a bath, I just haven't been keeping up with my blog posting! Turns out Ella loves the bath. Not me, for my first bath I screamed so hard my entire body turned red. But Ella was totally calm. Good thing, because she gets lots of crud in her crease-y parts.
Recently, Ella got her first shower when Seth and I took her for a walk in the park and it started pouring. Actually, we had an umbrella that fit perfectly over her stroller, so mostly it was me and Seth who got soaked!

The Incredible Expanding Baby!

How's breastfeeding going, you ask?

Well, when Ella was born, she was long and lean--19 1/2 inches long and 6 lb 6 oz:

At her four day checkup she was down to 6 lbs, a normal loss for the first week. From there she took off and started expanding in all directions! By 3 weeks she was 8lb 7oz:

(that's our midwife Deborah, doing some wonderful tricks with Ella--she has the magic baby touch)

and by her 1 month doctor's appointment she was 9lb 6oz, 21 inches long:













Now she's almost 11 pounds. Well, a couple days ago she was almost 11 pounds, so now she's probably over 11. Little chunker. She gets a pretty good chin going and when she leans to the side she gets little fat rolls all along the side of her belly. Her thighs are probably twice as big around as they were before. Even her head is a couple inches bigger around than it was when she was born. She'll need a big brain to control that unwieldy body!

Fashionista

With a mom so obsessed with fashion throughout pregnany, it's no wonder that little Ella is quite the fashion-conscious baby.

In this little blue number, Ella pays homage to her prenatal nickname (it says 1...2...3 Scooters!).
Of course, getting into this outfit was a bit of a challenge. Daddy tried to dress her himself. From the other room I heard a wicked scream and thought "oh, that must not have gone well, I'll go help in a minute." Then 30 seconds later, Seth appears in the bedroom with a screaming baby in his arms. The problem? Where her head should be, there is a blue swath of fabric. Apparently he tried to do head and arms at once and when she got her hand inside the onesie she grabbed on and wouldn't let go. He's such an amazing dad and so good at quieting her when she's upset, it's good for my mommy self-esteem to know there are some things I can do better!

Most of the time, though, Ella sports just an enormous cloth diaper and a blanket. So this season it's all about the accessories.

The socks:
The bunny slippers:


And of course, the sun hat!
Don't worry, her nudity does not mean she's clothes-deprived. Generous family and friends have provided more clothes than a hot little baby can model! As soon as it gets cooler out, we'll have to do several outfit changes a day to show off all her gorgeous duds. And maybe by then mommy will be wearing clothes more often herself so that some of the pictures of mommy and Ella will be decent for posting on the internet!

Cutest Baby Ever, Probably

So I may just think this because I'm the dad, but I also happen to have it on good authority that Ella is a very cute baby, even as babies go. Needless to say, her mother agrees as well.

She's got Lauren's big eyes and my hair and a dimpled chin that can only have come from Lauren's dad's side of the family. Possibly when she's older and her cheeks fill out they'll have dimples too. We can only hope. I just hope that as she gets older she doesn't let her looks go to her head.

Here is her 5 day old face.


And here it is again at 17 days.



Which is cuter? You be the judge.

Birth Story

So now it’s my turn to relate things from my perspective. It’s mostly a story of awesomeness and how great a job Lauren did at everything, but there are also some scary parts that were no fun at all. But mostly it’s a story of our completely awesome and ridiculously cute little girl.

The Birth

For a while, Lauren had been getting up in the middle of the night just because she couldn’t sleep. I told her to go ahead and wake me up if she wanted company. So, when she woke me up at 4:30 in the morning because she had been up since 2:00 with some practice contractions, and I (half asleep) refused to get up unless she made me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, how was I to know that I had just demanded meal service of my actually laboring wife?

Neither of us knew it was for real. We took a couple of naps that morning and wondered if I should call my friend Tyler and ask him to teach for me that day. At about 12:00 I decided to go shopping and suggested that Lauren come with me. She got as far as the car when she realized that it probably wasn’t going to be a good idea, so she went back to the apartment and I went to the store alone.

By the time I got back at 1:30 Lauren was really having some serious contractions and was upset that she wasn’t able to control her reaction to them like she thought she would be. I mean, after all, if she couldn’t be mellow and calm about these practice contractions (like the ladies in the hypnobirthing videos), how was she going to handle the real thing?

By 2:30 her water broke and we realized that this was the real thing. Oddly, this made us both feel better. I mean, at least Lauren wasn't going to have to do this again next week or something. Deborah, our midwife, came over at about 3:00, and when she got the opportunity to see what was going on she found that Lauren’s cervix was 90% effaced (thinned out) and 5 centimeters dilated (half-way open). Upon seeing this she called her assistant, Emily, and it was on!

We spent a couple of hours on the floor dealing with more and more rapid contractions, and when Lauren felt the desire to start pushing, we moved to the tub, where it was my job to say encouraging things and make sure that she didn't dunk her face in the water while she was bearing down and snarf some of it up.

[Note the Natalie Dee strawberry (Lauren's birthing color [a hypnobirthing thing]) on the wall encouraging her as well.]

All this seemed way harder to me than it did to Lauren, I now find out. At one point, the thought occurred to me

that Lauren was really suffering and that idea brought some tears to my eyes. But she says that after her water released, the happy hormones kicked in (endorphins and oxytocin, etc.) and everything felt way faster to her and way blurrier. When a contraction came on she was working really hard, but between them she was pretty mellow, smiling or even kind of sleeping.

After a couple of hours in the tub, we started to see the first bits of Scooter, a pointy little head with a cap of white membrane still on it. At which point I became extremely excited and extremely inarticulate. When the head came out, I was basically babbling like a freak. And one contraction after that, out she came! “Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god!” was all I could say over and over again.

Lauren grabbed her, I grabbed her and Deborah grabbed her. She was a slippery soft little water sausage a little wrapped up in the cord and not able to come up all the way, so Deborah repeated, “Give me the baby, Give me the baby, Give me the baby,” several times before I understood what she was saying and that she was saying it to me. I finally let go and she unraveled her, swished off her membrane and put her on Lauren’s chest. And then, oh the tears! In floods of gasping joy. A second later these pictures were snapped.

A minute later we began to wonder if she was a boy or a girl. A quick check and we knew that Scooter was Ella!

After The Birth

Shortly after that, Lauren stepped out of the tub and lay on the floor to deliver the placenta. It came within a half an hour, but she was still passing a lot of blood, enough for it to be confused with bloody urine. She lay there for a total of 2 hours feeling very woozy and on the verge of unconsciousness. Deborah kept her awake and kept her talking while I held the baby and fed Lauren two bananas, 2 glasses of energy drink, 1 piece of toast, 3 glasses of chocolate milk and a bowl of ice cream, which she dutifully wolfed down in an effort to get her blood sugar back up and get her stabilized. Unfortunately this strategy was not enough, and after she was still bleeding and loosing consciousness after 2 hours it was time to go to the hospital.

We were determined not to have the baby admitted to the hospital to be needlessly poked and prodded and injected with things, so the EMTs came and took Lauren and I stayed home with the baby. Thankfully, we each had a midwife (Deborah went with Lauren and Emily stayed with me) and our respective moms with us, but still it was a hard, hard night. Probably the hardest of my life. I’m not sure I can describe what it was like, but I’ll just say that the feeling of responsibility that comes with new fatherhood and concern for your brand new baby, the most precious and fragile thing that you've ever seen, combined with the worry that your spouse is in serious

peril is an overwhelming combination of emotions for any mortal, and it does not allow for any sleeping (even though you haven’t slept in 24 hours) or any eating (even though you’ve had exactly one bowl of cereal and one banana in the last 20 hours) which doesn't make things any better.

The first night:

We both got through the night, me worrying about Lauren and Lauren worrying about me while being prodded and monitored. At 7:00 the next morning we went in and brought Ella to Lauren. The hospital said they would not have to admit the baby as long as there was someone other than the patient with her, so that was no problem. In fact the staff at Cambridge Hospital was much more respectful of our hippy home-birth perspective than I expected. The nurses were all darlings and were helpful and comforting and sweet to our little baby.

Diagnosis: Probably, there was a small piece of placenta left inside Lauren that her uterus kept trying to expel. This is common and not a big problem these days. Had it been a century ago, Lauren would have been in serious danger of her life, but 24 hours under observation and a couple units of blood transfusion later, her hematocrit (red blood cell volume) was back up to about 24%, which is still low (38% is normal), but close to normal for post partum. At 9:00 PM Lauren was released from the hospital and able to enjoy her little precious-pie-face in her own home.

The second night:

Finally we're at home as a family of three.

Now Lauren is still very weak and can't do much (not even walk a few block, which we found out the hard way), but the memories of her bloody and wilting away are fast being replaced by the memory of her strength and determination to birth her baby naturally and the way it was best for her. She will probably not be doing any triathlons this summer, but soon ... soon.

Pictures finally

She sleeps:


She gets upset and daddy changes her diaper, walks briskly around the apartment with her, bounces on the ball, sings a silly song, and repeats:

She eats, looks around, burps and gurgles some:


Then goes floppy for a while:
And repeats.
So far its been all we can do to get through the cycle then sit back and look at her adorable feet or discover a new body part we haven't kissed or take a picture of what, this time, really must be the cutest thing anybody has ever done.
We wouldn't even be able to do that much if her two grandmas hadn't been here with us the whole time. Thanks, Grandmas!