I can't believe that our little one is already seven weeks old, although as a congregation member commented to me yesterday, it feels like I have always known Kelly Rhiannon. I've been meaning to actually write in this blog--instead of only posting pictures with captions. It's a little easier to do now that Kelly has started to grow out of her cranky phase. She still prefers to be held at all times and be included in everything Micah and I do, but she cries less when she is put down and will even nap a little in the evenings alone in her bassinette!
So what's going on in the Baird household? Well, we have had a lot of visitors recently, but things have calmed down a bit. I am working from home part-time (except for Sundays of course--it's hard to preach from home!) so I get to spend lots of time with Kelly. I had to learn how to type with a sleeping baby balanced on my lap. I purchased an instructional video and Kelly had her first baby massage! She seems to really love this special time with Momma AND Daddy (he learned how to do it too).
We are all enjoying the nice summer weather in our little condo by the pond. Our neglected herb garden had gotten pretty overgrown since we've been too busy to cut back our perennial lemon balm, sage and chocolate mint (anyone want some?) and our crazy non-flowering wisteria so we spent the non-rainy part of Saturday outside working in the garden.
Friday night we joined Uncle Zach, Aunt Katie and Silas for some zydeco music in the park after a nice dinner celebrating Micah finishing his "Grand Rounds" presentation on arthrogryposis. If you don't know what arthrogryposis is you can ask Micah who has a 45 minute presentation on the congenital disorder, or you can ask me, Kelly and the bunnies--we've all heard it twice. While Micah was practicing it the other night Frodo made himself comfy right in front of Micah for the whole presentation and our little wild bunny (who we named "El-ahrairah" after the primordial rabbit trickster in Watership Down) listened from the patio--so he had quite an audience.
Speaking of wildlife, Frodo had a little visitor the other night. I was going to the kitchen to get something out of the medicine cabinet when I spied a huge black cricket in the kitchen sitting next to our bunny. If he was chirping, we didn't notice because there is a cricket that lives in our garden that we can hear from our bedroom window. When I tried to capture the cricket, it attempted to hide under Frodo! Eventually I caught it and escorted it back outside!
The biggest change around here in the last few weeks was the addition of WiiFit to our lives. Micah had been searching for a store that still had one in stock for a few weeks when he heard from an employee at our local Meijer's that they would be getting a shipment in at 5:30 on a Sunday morning. Micah woke up early (even I don't get up that early for church!) and headed to the car when he spied a neighbor across the street carrying a WiiFit box. He asked her where she got it and learned that the Meijer's did indeed receive the shipment and that although there were 30 units at 6 am, there were only a few left. He raced down the street and got one of the last three! WiiFit, for those of you who haven't heard of it, is a fitness video game that you play on the Nintendo Wii with a balance board. It lets us do yoga, strength exercises, step aerobics and balance games and it weighs us and charts our progress. I try to do it most days (when the baby lets me)--especially once I learned that the baby likes to do the step aerobics with me. I'm sure that the extra 10 pounds helps me burn more calories! I was also impressed at how good Micah is getting at Yoga--his favorite pose is the Tree. The Wii video game system also lets us challenge our brothers and sisters to a Mariocart race or a Dr. Mario game no matter if they live in Northern Ohio or Louisiana.
We celebrated our 6th anniversary yesterday. Micah and I have known each other for almost 12 years! So much has changed but so much has stayed the same! We still love mashed potatoes and he still surprises me with roses, but this year our baby Kelly joined us at the table, which was decked out with our wedding china and crystal. The menu this year included grilled lamb kabobs, mashed potatoes with boursin cheese, grilled asparagus and our favorite chianti. For dessert Micah made dark chocolate cookies with sour cherries from his new Martha Stewart Cookie cookbook (his first father's day present). Yes, we are "foodies" and we went all out cooking for our anniversary though the meal was NOT WeightWatcher's friendly--it was really delicious!
Well that's all for now.
Saturday was another first--Kelly's first tears! Talk about a heartbreaking sight. I kissed them away (after excitedly showing them to Micah) and they were so salty! The joys of motherhood are not lost on me I must say. Kelly's eyes are mysterious. I was so surprised to see how dark they were when she was born. I always assumed, I guess, that they would be light colored like everyone in my family. My sibs and I all have light color-shifting eyes. They can be green, blue, hazel, aqua (Shawn) or even ringed with darker colors (Bill). Of course I loved her dark brown eyes as soon as I saw them--they were Micah's tender brown eyes. But after 3 weeks or so Kelly's eyes started to lighten up--still brown but definitely a light brown almost tan. Now, who knows! They can be midnight blue, dark green, light brown, or most of the time, an indistinct gray. It will be interesting to see if they "choose" a color and stick to it or continue to change throughout her life in the Shevitz way. Right now they are a perfect blend of Momma and Daddy's eyes--dark like Daddy's and "Chameleon" like Momma's. (Remember that Micah proposed to me in a song that he wrote called "Chameleon Eyes") Today they seem green/hazel. What color do you think they are?
