Today Meera and I went to Doctor Alex’s office for Meera’s 6 week old Well-Baby-Visit. Meera now weighs 10 pounds 11 ounces. She’s 23 inches long. She is in the 75th percentile for both height and weight. She is doing great physically and developmentally. Dr. Alex says that Meera is “extraordinarily alert and interactive for a six week old.” Here’s Meera Grace, in a photo of her on the changing table in her room last night, laughing so hard she could barely breath:
Kyle and Owen seem to be competing with their baby sister in the growth competition — they appear to be in some sort of crazy growth spurt right now. Non-stop hungry (you’d be shocked if you could see how much they ate for dinner tonight) and they seem taller than even a couple of weeks ago. Our bathroom scale says that they each weigh precisely 45 pounds. I find it both bizarre/bewildering and amazing/amusing that they continue to both weigh the exact same amount. Recently they discovered something that they find very exciting– they can now touch their feet together under the kitchen table when seated across from one another.
…and its not just Meera and me…
K & O have been regularly having their own spontaneous nursing sessions with their own babies… often while I’m nursing too…
So at any given time in our house you might just find the six of us (me & Meera, the 2 boys & their 2 babies) sitting in the family room nursing nursing nursing —
I gotta say — it is such a riot!!!!!!!
Soon I’ll post about our 4th of July weekend.
Soon I’ll post a big post re-capping the past few weeks.
Soon I’ll post Meera’s birth story.
Soon I’ll figure out how to make time to blog real posts and not just pictures! ;0
As of today, at six weeks old, Meera Grace is now:
- one of the most easy, mellow, laid-back, happy babies on the planet — continuing to have the most sunny disposition and rarely unhappy
- smiling (often waking up smiling)
- laughing (started laughing on July 5 and has laughed many times each day since)
- trying to ‘talk’/interact with verbal sounds back-and-forth when people give her eye contact
- working very hard to suck on her fingers/hands (i.e., spending most of her waking hours struggling to get her right hand into her mouth)
- loving having her diaper changed
- kicking her legs like crazy
- still loving her black Baby Bjorn chair
- still loving her mobile of “friends”
- still loving a nice warm bath
- staring for hours at bright lights and contrasting colors
- sleeping more and crying less (which is saying a lot since she was already crying very little)… even during her ‘fussy period’ between 4-8pm each day
- sleeping through more than you can imagine (i.e., K & O’s loud antics)
- wanting to eat (and demanding it) every 2-4 hours, 24×7, no exceptions
- watching with wide eyes as her crazy brothers play like maniacs around her
- enjoying one bottle each night with her Papi
- adoring her Mama as if she were the center of the entire universe, lighting up when she sees her, cooing and squealing with delight, etc.
- loving life
- fitting in pretty darn perfectly with our family
Today Meera Grace met her Godmother. Beth came from Connecticut to visit and meet her baby bundle. It was a special day for me — to see these two together. Braydon and I could not be happier that Meera will have Beth as a special force in her life. Choosing godparents is tricky and Braydon and I take it very seriously —- the spiritual/religious aspects of it and lots of other aspects of it. Beth was the obvious choice for Meera Grace. Today was the start of many days that they’ll have together. Meera loved being held by Beth. She was deeply content in Beth’s arms. And she smiled huge, huge smiles at Beth for long stretches during the day. I want Meera to know that right from the start she had a really good connection with our dear dear dear dear dear friend Beth.4th of July Paintings by Kyle and Owen, painted this morning
Owen’s, on left, titled: “Fireworks, 4th of July Concert, and Moon” (important notes from the artist: yellow moon at top left, green grass at bottom, big and little fireworks all around)
Kyle’s, on right, titled: “Fireworks All The Way To God” (important notes from the artist: big fireworks shooting right off the top of the paper, dark green grass along bottom, instruments — violin, trumpet, and trombone — just above grass on left side)A lot of what I’m thinking about this 4th of July are the same things I was thinking about last 4th of July (click here for a post of mine from a year ago). The big difference this year is that Meera Grace is with us. As a tiny 5 week old baby, she is already so incredibly extravagantly privileged in so many, many ways. Just one of those ways is that she was born with automatic U.S. citizenship. Braydon and I both just had to laugh when, as easy as pie (American Pie; pun intended) Meera’s Social Security card, with brand new Social Security number printed right on it in fresh ink under her name, arrived in the mail a couple of weeks after she was born. It just arrived in the mail. Do you know how hard we had to work (how many hours and hours and hours were spent; how much frustration we experienced; how many phone calls we made; how many visits to the Social Security office we made; etc…) to get Social Security cards for Kyle and Owen??? Any adoptive parent knows how hard that process was (especially if you adopted from a place like Haiti where immigration has its… let’s just say… ‘issues’). Meera, like most of us born to privilege, doesn’t have a clue how very fortunate she is. She is unaware of the privileges she is cloaked with. She has no idea what a privilege it is to be a U.S. citizen, what a privilege it is to simply receive her Social Security card in the mailbox. The privilege — the unearned advantage — is invisible to her. As it is to most all of us who have it. Over the years, as we teach her –as best we can– to recognize her privileges, including the privilege of having been born here, our hope is that she’ll navigate privilege’s slippery slope with compassion and grace. We are living a life of plenty. What a slippery slope it is. Over the next few days, as we indulge in some of the luxuries that our life as we know it affords us, we will be remembering what a privilege it all is. Yes, that’s right, as we picnic and swim and barbecue and watch the fireworks we’ll be remembering just how unearned most of our advantages really are.
I’ve mentioned books on this blog before, but have never ‘plugged’ a book. And I’ve definitely never asked/nudged/pushed anyone to buy a book (not even my own book!) So this is a first. Having said that…
Please go buy this book!!!
You know we’re huge fans of the Livesay Haiti Blog. We’ve become huge fans of the Livesay family too— and the work that they’re doing in Haiti. Troy is a gifted photographer, and some of his beautiful Haiti photos are collected in this book.
I bought three copies of this book yesterday– one copy for our family’s coffee table, and a copy each for K & O (we’ll put them aside with some other ‘Haiti/Adoption-related-things’ that we’re collecting along the way to give to the boys when they are old enough to really appreciate them). Please consider buying this book, learning more about Haiti from it, and showing your support for what this family is doing on the ground in Haiti!
Please click here now to go check it out (and buy copies of it!)
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