Nellie is nearly six months old. That fact absolutely blows my mind. From the moment she came home from the hospital, she's been the Queen of our home. Whatever Nellie wants, Nellie gets...especially if Aubree's around.
Aubree loves having a sister. As soon as she comes home from school every day, she makes a beeline for "BABY!" Nellie is totally a momma's girl. From a super young age, she'd cry whenever anyone besides me held her. Even Mark could only get a couple minutes before she'd scream (we've now worked our way up to 15 minutes on good days).
Aubree is the only exception to that rule. Nell loves her big sister!
One Sunday they wore matching dresses to church. Aubree exclaimed, "I've waited 10 years for this day!"
The first couple months of Nell's life are already fuzzy in my brain, but I know we all did lots of cute-baby snuggling.
I can understand why people often say "three kids is the hardest." Even though five kids is significantly more than three, my two oldest are big enough to be legitimate helpers! I was sad when school started back up and Aubree was gone most of the day.
Thane loves to touch and talk to Nellie. He insists on calling her "Nellie Jelly Belly BETH," and turns it in to a chant.
Graham has shown no malice or jealousy towards his baby sister (instead, he's directed his jealousy and competition up - to Thane). For months, every night when we asked him, "What was the best part of your day?" he would answer, "Nellie being born!"
We'd ask the next question, "What have you been thinking about?"
"Nellie!"
So much better afterwards!
When she was six weeks old, I took her to our Stake's Relief Society overnight retreat. She was the only baby in attendance. Imagine 150 women (the vast majority mothers and grandmothers), and only one baby. Yep. Nell got TONS of attention.
At that point, Nellie had been sleeping reasonably well at night. "I can sleep in the dorm with forty other ladies," I thought, "no big deal!"
I guess that's a pretty good indicator that I wasn't thinking terribly clearly! At 4am when Nellie woke up, I began to understand my poor choice. "Shhhh, Shhhh," I whispered as I tried to get her back to sleep. Thankfully, Nellie did little more than whimper and our cabin was FULL of loud snoring women. I've never been more grateful for snoring!
People love to ask, "is she a good baby?"
That's such a hard question to answer! Of course she's a good baby. She's a baby, and that automatically makes her good. However, I know what they're really asking, so my actual answer is, "she's right in the middle."
I've had two "hard" babies, and two "easy" babies, and Nellie falls more on the harder side, but still smack in the middle. As long as she's with me, she's pretty happy. She loves baths, getting attention, looking at pictures of herself, and being held.
She is also quite fond of being swaddled, smiling, sucking on her hands, and slobbering.
She does not like her car seat. I hear stories of babies who fall asleep as soon as they're in their car seat, and just love being in the car. I'm beginning to think those stories are just myths!
She also does not particularly like to sleep. She's ridiculously aware of what's going on around her and hates to miss anything. To get her to go to sleep, I have to put a blanket over the top of her head so she can't see anything!
If you can't tell, we adore our little Queen!
1 comment:
She's so beautiful. I see your whole family in her in each picture.
Post a Comment