This is an Elodie post!
It's winter, and we're home together on maternity leave. Life lately consists of lots of snuggly naps, hot tea, eating, feeding, picture books, and living room dance parties. The girls have gotten comfortable with and protective of our newest family member, it's very cute.
Elodie is already eight weeks old. I'm glad she's getting bigger, my constant worry about her getting sick gets better and better the older she gets, but being eight weeks old also means I only have four more weeks to be home with her. The meltdowns about returning to work are in full swing. She is way too tiny to be without her mom all day and it makes no sense to me to work all day just to pay for someone else to take care of my baby. I've tried to convince Eric to move to Europe multiple times in the last couple of months. Seriously.
Before Elodie was born, tons of people gave us insider knowledge and advice. Most of it was complaining about the bad stuff, although we had a few friends share the good. And some of the bad is true. Sleep is a little rough in the beginning, your body is wrecked, and you do change a lot of diapers. That sounded terrible to the pre-baby Katie, but then the baby comes and you honestly just don't care about the bad things. It's so cool that you just shoved a human out of your body and you both survived, and then you get to take the cutest little human home and play with her all day long. It's like you got the best Christmas toy of all time, an incredible toy that provides endless entertainment. And you LOVE them on top of it, more than anything. It's so oversimplified to say there is just good and bad to having a baby, or to just complain and say it's hard and you're tired. Maybe it is hard, but it's also wonderful, frustrating, exciting, cool, weird, funny, fascinating, overwhelming, and magical. It is a trip like you have never been on.
We were staring at E sleeping the other day and I told Eric it's kind of sad that she'll never love us as much as we love her. He was like, that's not true! So I asked if he loved his parents as much as he loves Elodie. Nope. And we've only known her for 2 months.
I want to throw out there how impressed I am with the female body. First, you think you're going to pop open like in Alien, but you don't. Then you think you're going to literally die of pain, but you don't. Then you think you'll never recover, never look the same. But, miraculously, you do. We are programmed to forget the pain of childbirth, otherwise we wouldn't do it again. I remember asking Eric exactly that during labor, "who would do this AGAIN?!" Knowing ahead of time that all would eventually be forgotten, I made it a point to journal while in recovery to make sure to have an accurate and detailed account of what went down. It's a very scary journal entry. But, yeah, I'd do it again. Blame biology. And blame her ridiculous cuteness!!!
Like these monster feet. Two pairs.
My "postpartum anxiety" has me convinced she has a fever at all times, so she's half dressed a lot around here. Being half dressed also makes it easier to kiss that tummy!
^^She loves her dad so much^^
^^Beautiful baby!^^
