On Three...

Prepare for a bit of a photo overload. My personal photographer Amy came by for a visit and took a million precious pictures of our new little subject -- sweet Baby Brystol at three weeks. (If we're technical, the pictures were taken a couple of days before she was three weeks old, but I'm not picky.)

Brystol loves to sleep with her arm behind her head, her left arm in particular. I remember watching her so often on ultrasounds with her arms all around her head or her face, and it's funny to me to watch her doing the very same thing out in the big world. I wonder if she will always prefer sleeping this way.




(With that little smirk, she looks like she's fake sleeping in this picture.)


A sweet bracelet from my friend Lisa




Finding Fingers


The Monkey Face








Beautiful Baby


Mommy's Girl

Though Brystol is a beauty and a treasure, these first three weeks with baby have been very challenging for us all. We anticipated sleepless nights, nursing challenges, and overall family growing pains, but certainly not to the extent that we've felt them. It didn't help that I started out as the walking wounded or that Brystol doubled as the incredible shrinking baby -- those things would have been challenging enough on their own. What we didn't anticipate was just how hard all the sleepless nights (and days) would be, or how difficult nursing (and pumping and supplementing) every 2-3 hours around the clock would be, or just how painful the transition from little sister and big brother to big sister and bigger brother would be. Even our dog is out of whack! I think it would be fair to say that we're surviving. We're happily just getting by and we wouldn't change a thing.