Month by Month: 1

So, even though I’m super behind with this blog, I’ve decided that I will continue my tradition of doing Month Milestone posts for my kids’ first year of life. Don’t want the Little Miss to feel left out of all the fun! Plus, I need these pictures for when I make my blog book for 2014.

So here she is at one month, and just as cute as can be! (It's hard for me to believe she is now 8 months old. But then, it's also hard for me to believe that Alex is already 8 years old!)

She is wearing a little sweater with matching booties and a bonnet that was mine when I was a baby. My mom faithfully saved several little outfits that were mine all those years ago so I could dress my own daughter in them one day. After three boys, I think both of us were just about to give up hope that I would have a little girl of my own! And then Elizabeth gave us a happy surprise.

Elizabeth is really a very easy baby, and this was true even when she was a newborn. She started sleeping 4-5 hours stretches at night almost immediately, which meant that I was only having to get up once per night for a feeding. I didn't even feel like I HAD a newborn, except that she was so sweet and cuddly and little!

Elizabeth got her first shots when she was just a few days old, and then when she was a week old, we went back into the clinic where she was born for check-ups for both her and me. It was at this visit that the pediatrician who examined her told us that he wanted us to take her in for an "eco" on her hips when she was one month old, to check for possible hip dysplacia. He told us it would help if we used cloth diapers to help her hips spread apart over the next 3 weeks. Chalk another one up to the benefits of cloth diapering! These diapers have lasted me through 4 babies, and I think they will still have plenty of wear left in them when Elizabeth is done using them.

The first month was taken up with getting started on some of Elizabeth's paperwork -- because she was born in Ecuador, she has Ecuadorian citizenship, which not only has a certain "cool factor" (of our 3 foreign-born children, she is the only one who has dual citizenship), but will allow us to eventually apply for residency visas for our whole family (more complicated to obtain, but over the long haul, much cheaper than missionary visas which are now good only for one year!). However, dual citizenship also means twice the work in the beginning -- 2 birth certificates, 2 passports, plus a bunch of other random documents. So we worked on it over the course of several weeks because each document required at least one trip into Quito, and sometimes, Elizabeth had to be present.

You'll get to watch my baby girl grow up over the course of the next several posts!