More pictures!

Evelyn is starting to get more and more "personality" so posting pictures is getting less and less frequent. Her favorite thing is to cry, for no apparent reason, making me very frustrated. I feel like I need to fix the situation or help her in some way, when there is nothing really to do. Change her diaper? Check. Feed her? Check. Hold her and sway in place? Check. Well, then, I can't do much more than that. It makes me so sad to hear her cry, though. She doesn't have colic or anything, just cries when she has some down time.

It's OK, though. Really. It is. Evie is just growing a little older so she's sleeping less and filling her time with other things. Soon she'll be interested in toys and sounds and other things that can fill her day.

And here are some pictures!

Evelyn's first trip to the mall! We're in the elevator overlooking some sort of art display, I guess.

















With her grandmother. I like Evie's face in this one. :)

















Evie's first bottle! My mom got me a breast pump as an early birthday present so we were able to express milk for a bottle. Jon tries to give her one bottle a day, usually at night.


















My pretty sleeping baby.

















A weekend trip to the dog park.

Sweaters!

Everything in the world of Lew is going well. Evie is a doll, of course, and starting to get more of a personality. By "personality," of course, I mean "crying." But that is OK. She has her "unhappy hour" from 10:30 to about 12:30 each night. I'd prefer that be from 9 to 11 at night, or maybe not even exist at all, but such is life. Jon is pretty good about staying up with her at that time since I get so exhausted by the end of the day. Breastfeeding is exhausting. I'm happy to be giving my daughter the best food possible, but woah. It hurts and it takes forever and I feel like a milking cow 8 hours out of 24. Today Evie has decided to eat for five minutes and then fall into a deep deep sleep. For 45 or 60 minutes, and then she's hungry again. This started at about 4am. I have tried the wake up tricks, but they aren't working this morning. Alas, she'll get back to a normal schedule soon, I'm sure.

I've decided that this time during maternity leave might be a good time to try to learn a new knitting skill. I'm going to try to knit a sweater!! Yes, a sweater. It's not like I have loads of free time on my hands or anything, but I have more now than I will when Evelyn is starting to demand more and more attention AND I'm working 40 hours a week. I have a bit of time to myself now, while she sleeps, and I have an opportunity to go to the knitting shop to get help if I need it. I've found four or five easy-ish sweater patterns, like the one pictured above that I can't figure out how to move down here, and now I just need to choose one and get started.

Oh yeah, and finish the scarf I'm working on. It's coming along very well, just very slowly.

One two three four

Things you should know about my darling daughter.

1. She is awesome. But that really goes without saying.

2. She is loud. Not crying loud (well, she's that, too) but cooing crazy noises loud. She makes these sounds...kind of like a gutteral cat going "mrawrrrr." And she grunts a lot. A LOT. Very loudly. It is pretty funny.

3. Someday Evelyn might go through a punk antiestablishment phase and shave her head. If she does, she'll find a nice little scar on the side of her head. The surgeons knicked her with the scalpel when they were trying to get her out during the c-section. Yet another testament to how fast everything was moving during the surgery.

4. She makes the best faces of any person I've ever seen. They don't mean anything, I know, but I like to watch her face and pretend they are a narrative. She goes from confused to smirking to surprised to angry and on and on. It is fabulous.

And some pictures. The pictures are light today because I live in a cave, devoid of natural sunlight. Every picture turns out dark and grainy, or washed out from the flash. I am so over this apartment.

Sleeping baby, double exposed.

Baby and Grandma Mary

Who is a Daddy's girl?

Baby in her little Yukata (a Japanese cotton kimono thing. We got it in Japan.)

A letter to my daughter

Dear Evelyn,
You have been home for a week now and there are some things you should know. Things I will inevitably forget by the time you start asking about yourself as a baby. First, you are an excellent baby. Only 11 days old, sure, but so far you are absolutely perfect. You only cry or fuss when you are hungry or wearing a dirty diaper. You are sleeping 3 or 4 hours at a a time at night. You eat all the time, which is good for a growing girl like you.

A few things that surprised me this week are both changing table related. You have peed on everyone who has changed your diaper. It's pretty hilarious, actually. Last night you peed on grandma twice, in one changing. I thought little boys were the culprits in peeing with their diapers off, but I guess this particular gift is equal opportunity. The other surprising thing is how many diapers you are using! We've had to up our cloth diaper delivery for next week because you are a diaper dirtying machine. We've gone through 55 diapers since Wednesday morning. That's like 15 a day, or over 100 a week! We have to go get a bigger diaper pail today! It is truly amazing. I know all new moms are amazed by the number of diapers they go through, but I have to believe this is an extra high number. It has to be. It's insane.

How are we going through so many diapers? Well...you hate to be wet. So you cry every single time you pee, and we change you. Also, you have a special gift for pooping in a freshly changed diaper. Yes, you are quite gifted and we love every second of you.

The rest of the time you just sleep, look adorable, or stare at lights. What a great baby.

I can't wait to see what each new week brings. You are a gift.

Love,
Your mom, who hasn't showered in two days.


And just for fun, here are some pictures for Evie's first lunch excursion with two grandmothers. We had fish and chips.

How Baby E was born

I think I posted earlier that little Baby E was born via an emergency c-section. Here's the whole store.

Monday night around 9pm I started to feel a little funny. Really soon, by like 9:10, I was in extraordinary pain. Just abdominal pain. Not contraction-like pain, I thought. I called my midwife and she told me to get to the hospital immediately. They were going to admit me to the labor and delivery triage area to assess the situation, but they ran out of beds! So instead I was sent to the labor and delivery floor observation room. They put me on lots of monitors and realized the baby was fine. Normal heart rate. Normal blood oxygen levels. No contractions. No dialation. I was definitely not in labor. But I was in amazing pain. I couldn't move much at all, I couldn't walk. But the nurses couldn't figure out what was going on. The ob-gyn on call came in and didn't know what was going on. Was it just a gastrointestinal issue? Was it the appendix?

Then, a few minutes before they were going to send me to another area of the hospital for an abdominal ultrasound, the baby's heart rate started to decelerate. It went back up, then back down, and then stayed down. Before I knew it I was being rushed into an operating room for a crash c-section. From the time I entered the O.R. to the time E was born, it was 6 minutes. I was put under general anesthesia so I had no idea what happened; I just woke up with a baby!

Turns out I had a ruptured blood vessel on the outside of my uterus and I had been bleeding internally. They didn't realize this until they opened me up to get the baby out and, woah, look at all the blood. Pretty scary. E was born by the time Jon had scrubbed in and been allowed into the O.R.

After I woke up, doctors kept coming to my room and saying, "In 15 years of medicine I've never seen this before" and things like that. Not very reassuring. So no one has any idea why this vessel ruptured. No one has any idea if it would happen again if I got pregnant again. The general consensus seems to be that it was such a weird, fluke thing that another pregnancy is probably OK. But it will certainly give me pause when Jon and I get to that point.

But everything turned out OK. The baby is perfect. I am recovering and will be for quite a few weeks.

Now that we are home, things are starting to get into a rhythm. Feeding, sleeping, pooping. We are doing well, though, and I couldn't be happier.

Hospital baby pics

Who has the most perfect baby?

It's me!

We have a baby!

We have a baby!

After a somewhat traumatic experience to get her here, including an emergency c-section following some internal bleeding and near-death experience, little baby Evelyn Mary Lew was born at 1:00am September 2. She weighed 5 lbs, 15 oz and was 19 inches long. She has incredible monkey toes and looong fingers. She's also a big fan of sucking on anything nearby. She is a doll. Seriously gorgeous. Lots of brown hair on her head (and shoulders and back...) and deep gray-blue eyes. It will be fun to see what she looks like as she grows a little. Right now the top half of her face looks like Jon and the bottom half looks like me.

I'm still in the hospital so the connection is slow and I can't post many pictures. This one will have to suffice for now. I'll post more later, once I'm home and settled.

Babies!!