Beautiful gifts

I completely forgot to mention this, what with all the excitement over the last few months.  See the green bracelet Grace is sporting?  That, my friends, is a gift from the most wonderful KarmaCat, who sent this gift to Grace soon after Mary Ellen was born.  It was to celebrate her being a big sister!

Grace loves this bracelet.  She only takes it off for baths and her swim lessons.  There have been a couple of occasions where we thought she’d lost it, but fortunately we have found it again and it’s been returned safely to her arm.

So now she has one bracelet on her left arm, and one on her right.  Good thing she loves jewelry!

Grace is actually a really great big sister.  I haven’t really noticed any kind of sibling rivalry on Grace’s part.  She doesn’t try to shove Mary Ellen out of my lap, nor does she insist on my attention while I’m trying to tend to Mary Ellen.  I think she realizes that Mary Ellen is too little to do most things on her own, so I have to do them for her.

She has gotten a little more needy over the last couple of months.  I used to be able to do my own thing (housework, etc) for most of the day without a whole lot of interruption from Grace.  Now it’s “Look, Mommy!!  Look at me, Mommy!  Mommy, look at MEEEEE!” every five minutes.  Most of the time she’s doing something cute, but let me tell you — it gets old.

I realize that it’s a reaction to losing my full attention, so I try not to let it get to me.  But it’s hard sometimes.

Have I mentioned Mary Ellen lately?

She’s eight weeks old already, which totally boggles my mind.  Where has the time gone?  It feels like she was just born yesterday.  I look at how big she’s getting and marvel at her size.  She was born so tiny, and now she’s so big!  I had to take her in to the doctor at 5½ weeks when she caught my nasty cold, and she had already grown three inches and gained three pounds!  I’m guessing she’s over 10 pounds already.  She’s well out of newborn-sized diapers and clothes already.

Speaking of beautiful gifts, the afghan that Mary Ellen is laying on was crocheted by my good friend Tracey.  She had asked me during my pregnancy what colors I preferred, and I told her bright rainbow colors.  She did such a great job — this blanket is one of the most beautiful ones I’ve ever seen.  And it’s the perfect size too!  I’m sure Mary Ellen will treasure this blanket for years to come, the way I treasure the pink and blue blanket in the photo behind Mary Ellen.  I’ve had it my entire life.

I thought for a time she was tired of being swaddled, but I think it’s that we weren’t swaddling her tight enough.  Kurt insists that she prefers to be swaddled fairly loosely, but when I have her on my own, she’ll fuss until I swaddle her as tightly as I can.  To that end, I went to Babies R Us yesterday and got her the large size swaddlers, as she is growing out of the small, but they’re still a bit too large.  Right now she’s snoozing in her bouncy seat, but she isn’t all that happy.  I think it’s because she’s in one of the large swaddlers, and she’s not wrapped tightly enough.

What’s neat is we can actually swaddle her while she’s in her car seat!  The swaddlers have a hole at the back to insert the female end of the seatbelt, and after the seatbelt is fastened around her, you bring up the wings of the swaddler and wrap her up!  We’ve only done it once so far, but it’s nice to have that option when we’re at someone’s house, and the carseat is the only place we have to put her.

Mary Ellen adores her carseat.  On Wednesday, I put her in the carseat at 2:30pm after I fed and changed her, knowing we had to leave at 3:30 for Grace’s swim lessons.  As soon as we got home from swim lessons, we heated up some leftovers and quickly ate dinner since Kurt had class.  It had been moved to Wednesday because of the election on Tuesday.  He headed out at 5:30, and I sat down to work on my contribution to the ornament exchange.  It wasn’t till after 7pm that I remembered about Mary Ellen — who’d been snoozing so deeply in her carseat the whole time!

I’ve known friends who let their babies sleep in their carseats every night.  There’s just something about sleeping in a partially seated position that appeals to babies.  Fortunately, Mary Ellen doesn’t mind sleeping in her bassinet, but if she ever gets fussy, the first place we’ll try to get her to sleep is her carseat.

So that’s just about all the news from Rhode Island tonight.  Maybe something exciting will happen tomorrow!