thankful

by abbienelson

Well, friends, a lot has happened in the last… uh… 10 months? since I updated the blog.  Including:

The birth of the sweetest, most beautiful baby girl.  Lucie Maude arrived about a month early on July 31st, and we are entirely taken with her, Cora included.  Her birth was wild, and all I have to say about it is that natural childbirth is for the birds.  I would schedule a c-section before I would do that again.  She is so dear, though.  Four months in and we are still sleeping in 2 and 3 hour spurts, which are often interrupted in the middle of the night by a deranged 3-year-old who is screaming because she thinks she saw a bug or some other scary thing that requires an adult to move into her bed for the rest of the night.  Life with two children is exponentially more chaotic than with one, but perhaps it is exponentially better, too?  I don’t know. I’m too tired to accurately assess the situation.  (and in any case, we’re stuck with both of them, so what does it matter if it’s better or worse.  it just is.)

Cora started school three days a week, which has preserved the sanity of the entire family.  She love-love-love’s it, and has been bringing home some pretty fantastic artwork, improved block-building skills (i.e. things like buildings and supermen and trees, not just towers to knock down), and stories about entirely made-up people and events.  Her imaginary world is wild and wonderful, and she spends much of her free-play-time at home talking (usually in bossy tones and phrases) to her baby dolls and stuffed animals, carting them around and reading them books.  She runs everywhere, talks and sings constantly, and for all that can be surprisingly shy at parties and in large groups.  She went through a brief experimentation phase recently with swearing, but seems to have moved on, rather to my disappointment.  There is something so entertaining about a three-year-old saying ‘dammit’ and ‘goddonit’ (i.e. doggonit).

She is a huge fan of Lucie, and has started referring to her with possessive pronouns: “Did my baby wake up?  Is that my baby crying?”  She wants to hold her and (hilariously) to see her poops every time she gets changed, and dearly loves to dress her up.  A couple of days after we came home from the hospital, I found a swaddled Lucie asleep in her basket with lots of stickers stuck all over her blankets.  I found her tonight with Cora’s dirty socks crammed on her feet and Cora’s necklace on her head.  Lucie doesn’t seem to mind, and she has given Cora some of her most enthusiastic coos and smiles.

I am home full-time for now.  School starts back up in January, which will be a shock to my system after a whole 6-month break, and I will probably work a tiny bit here and there, but mostly I am going to focus on keeping the lid on things at home for a while.

What else?  OH: also, I went to India.  My sister got married in June to an actual Indian, and I hauled my pregnant self there and back in the space of a week for the wedding.  It was a crazy, mostly-good experience that I will post separately about at some point.  They are happily installed in Boston, and, with Bonnie hunting for a job in San Diego, it looks like our family will be living all in the same country for the forseeable future.

I think that is more or less it.  I have a katrillion pictures to post at some point, and I’ll get a post up about India, but I think we are basically caught up for now.  More soon, I promise.

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