The difference a year makes

This time last year we had as of about 7:30am found out that we were just over 6 weeks pregnant with babykins

and today, a whole year on to the day, we have the most wonderful little girl in the world. Just look at how much she's grown.

It's hard to believe she's almost 5 months old......and still in her 0-3month clothing.....lol

oh such a Glamourous life I lead

This was the thought that was running through my head this morning about 45 mins after I'd gotten up. Babykins had been fed, we were snuggling and getting her wind up when the unmistakable feeling of hot, wet spit up running down my cleavage happened. No one ever warns you of these 'special' moments, or that your little one will then happily lay on the bed while you find a change of everything and giggle at you.

I don't know how some of these celebrity mom's manage to look so glamorous all the time mere days after having their latest baby - well yes I do - they have an army of helpers willing to take and feed the little one and pamper the mother til she looks like a goddess. There's the constant - she got her figure back in 8 weeks - you can too........

yes right that'll be in my dreams.

Babykins is a happy little thing, but she likes to have the time and complete attention of one adult at all times while she's awake. She's coming up to 5 months and is full of curiosity about everything. She loves watching Top Gear (why is my daughter already into high speed cars?) and for some reason, the weather channel.....especially the radar maps.....I think its the colours that grab her attention. Right now that's what she's doing watching the weather while concentrating very hard on a lovely smelly diaper for mummy.

I shouldn't complain, so I have no time to exercise regularly, but I get to play with the prettiest little girl in the world. The house is a mess, but when you only get an hours worth of nap a day you learn to prioritise  and getting a meal for me has become more important than dusting the house, and the dust bunnies are happily playing with the cat, so it's all good. Then April is coming up and the lull in the  HPKCHC should give me a little more time to throw at getting this house tidy and well it'll never be spotless but at least it can be said that we definitely live life in this house.

In other news, babykins has started eating real food - well baby rice. This is huge for me because it gives me a small break from her being on the boob almost all the time. she goes an extra hour between feeds when she's had the rice before her dose of mummy milk and I can't wait until the end of this week when we can start the next step of the food adventure and try.......carrots and then theres all the fun of sweet potato, peas, squash....and the fruits after that. So far it's not been as messy as I thought, she's been pretty good and hasn't spit everything out all over mummy......that I know will come soon and she'll find it hysterical that mummy is covered in whatever it is she has spit out in disgust.

And we're back full circle to how glamourous it is to be mummy when you end up covered in all sorts of things you once never thought you'd ever be covered in.

wouldn't change it for the world.

2 months

yes Babykins is two months old already, time flies.

Her 2 month check up was today and she's still a tiny thing for her age, finally into the 0-3 month clothing she's weighing in at 8lb 12oz - which is how much her youngest english cousin weighed at birth, and she's 22in long. This and her head measurement show that she's in proportion  and in the 5th-10th percentile.

She's doing well in other things, doing things like the rolling over that they don't expect to see much of until they're 4 months old, and babling away to her dr during her exam. She also smiled at the nurse before her shots. She calmed down really quickly after her shots, I was pretty impressed , it took me a lot longer to deal with needles so I'm hoping she'll be good about it and always take her shots so calmly.

I'm half expecting a cranky evening, Xero will be out gaming and she's been a bit fussy this afternoon, but we'll see.

of rolling and grinning and generally being cute

So we haven't really said much about babykins so far.

She was born late on a sunny afternoon by C section and the first things I heard ( being strapped down to the table and unable to move or see anything) was her crying and the nurses exclaiming how beautiful she was and how much hair she had.

She had a lot of hair.

Both of us were born with lots of hair so I was expecting the hair but it seems to be a point of exclaimation for everyone who meets her. It's lightening up quickly, it was so dark when she was first born and now it's mid brown and getting lighter, you can see blond strands in there and in the sunshine it has a beautiful coppery glow to it. She gets that from my side, and I expect at some point in the next few years she'll be a redhead for a while before turning blond and then slowly fading back to brown with red highlights.

Her eyes were very dark when she was born, deep dark almost navy blue. they as well are lightening over time and at almost 9 weeks old there a stormy grey/blue and so expressive.

Babykins other milestones are going well....she's laughing and grinning at us a fair bit of the time, she gurgles away at intervals holding a conversation with you. Last week she rolled over for the first time from her tummy to her back, and i caught it on our flip, not hoping she'd do it I was expecting to catch her wriggling herself forward a little like she'd done before. She repeated this rolling three more times before she got bored. She rolled again today, I'm such a proud mummy that she's so good at it. She's been trying to hold her head up from the very beginning. She's getting stronger with it all the time. She still loves curling up in a little ball on anyones chest to sleep.

Friday we go to see her pediatrician and she gets her first round of shots.....I'm quite glad that daddy will be home to help out with the probably cranky babykins.

The history stuff

So new years eve seems to be the day for reflecting on the history of Babykins.

Daddy and Mummy met many years ago through mutual friends who used to hang out in a msn chat room cunningly disguised as a medieval style inn - I say style because I've yet to see a bona fide medieval inn with jello pools - and we'd often spend the night chatting away over sometimes silly topics while I wrote my current paper for university (I had a lot to write). Time went on people drifted off from the group and came back or vanished for good and we were both still there, talking and keeping in touch with each other. when one friend reappeared after quite an absence she pointed out that all each of us was really talking about was the other person.....yes we were pretty oblivious. There followed a fair amount of transatlantic flights and trying to figure out if this was going to work, could this work long distance......well obviously it could and did. We got married in Scotland in April of 2007 and then went through the long process of getting me moved to the states, it took 18 months.

Then we started to find a house, buy the house, gained a cat - Mitzi - from the local shelter, and were trying for a family. Of all of them trying for a baby was the hardest. 2009 was a tough year all round. We lost 2 of my grandparents 4 months apart, and it seemed like I was flying back and forth all the time, nothing was working on the creating a babykins and while we kept trying I was getting very down about it and distracting myself with lots of knitting and awesomeness of the HPKCHC. After a full year of trying our hardest I called it and insisted we needed to go see someone and find out what was wrong, was my PCOS making it too hard or was there another reason. I spoke to my doc, who suggested a specialist and we finally got to see them in late march. In the meantime I'd relaxed a bit because I didn't think there was anything to be done until we saw someone and we went for a nice weekend away to meet up with some house cup friends and buy more yarn. We started the tests for the specialist and the first was an ultrasound to make sure theres no problems with my pipes so to speak.....We shocked the woman doing it. She said it was a first for her but there for us to see on the monitor was this little thing with a tiny fluttering heart just visible. We were just over 6 weeks.

I think I spent that first week in absolute shock, staring at the ultrasound picture as if I thought it was all a dream and I'd wake up to find it wasn't true. we had another scan 2 weeks later and everything was still fine so they signed us off and we started seeing a regular OB. We waited until we were 3 months before we told anyone but the immediate family, even my nieces and nephews didn't know til then. Then at 20 weeks we went for another scan - this time they could tell us we were having a girl, this meant we only had to narrow down 50% of the names we'd been considering.

At 28 weeks I failed the glucose test is spectacular fashion and started testing and all for Gestational Diabetes. We then had another scan at 32 weeks and at 36 weeks to check on baby and started twice weekly non-stress tests - where we spent up to an hour hooked up to a monitor. Each week we'd get a small scan to check fluid and vitals and although she used to play hide and seek with the monitor, on these they could see she had plenty of fluid and was doing everything they expected to see, practice breathing, moving, heart beating fine....

Because of the gestational diabetes our doctors didn't want us to go past our due date, so we finally got booked in for an induction starting late evening on the 10th November.......babykins was born in the evening on the 12th....but the story of all that will have to wait for another day :D

While Babykins sleeps

A first post, she's asleep right now curled up on her daddy's chest, so I'm taking the brief respite from the feeding and cuddling routine to get the blog up and running.

Babykins is six and a half weeks old and adorable. The next few posts I hope to go from when she was born right up to present day with hopefully weekly updates in our adventures into the scary world of parenting. Maybe one day she'll be able to read this and realise that her parents were crazy and may have been annoying at times but that we loved her right from the start.