This Present Joy

Although she's almost three months old, I haven't posted much about our youngest daughter, Hannah Jane. The past months (really, the past 11 months) have been filled with lots of unknown and worry about her--and I'm certainly not one to introvert in times like that, but somehow typing it all out and posting it on my blog has seemed too simple--almost irreverent in a way. Does that make any sense? But, recently, I've been meaning to type out Hannah's birth story and type out some thoughts and feelings I've been having--so she can look back when she's older and read them. Here is a bit of background and them some rambling thoughts. . . I won't go into all the details of my pregancy and the worry surrounding it, but basically, we had numerous sonograms which indicated that there may be a chromosomal abnormality. When she was born, Hannah had bladder exstrophy (her bladder was on the outside of her body). She was taken only an hour or two after birth to a c...

Carly was born with a lot of hair--and that may even be an understatement. I think she could have been the poster child for some sort of hair product at the ripe age of six months. She was born with straight hair, but somewhere along the way, it turned into a head of curls. Strangers would comment at stores, "Oh, she looks like a little Shirley Temple!" J gave her a trim at 6 months and then at 13 months, she got another trim from my mom's hairstylist. This trim was more of a cut, though--she came home looking like Dorothy Hammil (not quite that short, but it was much shorter than it had been). For the past months, I've been thinking to myself, "Carly's hair is out of control--she needs a trim." She would mostly wear it in a ponytail--not so much because she asked, but because it bothered me for her when I saw her continually push her hair out of her face when she played. That would have driven me crazy if it was my hair--did I ever tell you how when I ...

Carly and J went to a Daddy Daughter Dance last Friday. Truth be told, Carly didn't do much dancing on the ballroom floor, which is quite surprising--at this point in her 2 1/2 year old life, she eats, breathes, and sleeps dance music and dresses ("turn on the pino, Mommy"--that's "piano" in her language). J said she was a bit overwhelmed with the loud music, and I'm sure the crowd of 200+ people didn't help matters. Here's a picture pre-dance. This is about 15 minutes after I had to wake her up from a nap--never a good thing with a toddler, especially when you're trying to dress her in tights and put a bow in her hair. And, this is her post-dance. J said they spent most of their time in the hallways, running around (i.e. Carly ran and J served as an audience for her). Almost a week later, she still talks about the dance, the rose that she got and what they did when they were there. That's the stuff memories are made of, don't you a...