It's a Girl!

A great Saturday it has been and it's not even over yet. A friend of mine is due with her third baby (she has twin boys, 3 years old), and she had a fabulous baby shower today. It was a great affair. Delicious lunch. Yummy cake. And loads of pregnancy/infancy/breastfeeding toddler/preschool talk. My friend is also quite the Green Goddess. She used cloth diapers with her twins, and of course, plans to use them for the new baby. Cloth diapers. Cloth... diapers. I thought I was doing well with our Chlorine Free deal. Very impressive. Maybe the only thing more impressive would be the diaper-free infancy I read about a few months before Stella was born. So glad that isn't the AAP recommendation.

I was working on my long overdue Christmas gift thank you notes tonight, looking through my overstuffed and underorganized address book, and stumbled across Stella's ultrasound picture. It was taken September 2, 2008. 23 days before she was born. We had no idea what we were having; we didn't find out the sex with either of our kids. In this picture, her nose is smooshed down, her right fist is in her mouth. It looks just like her. Yet I was convinced she was going to be a boy. So much for mother's intuition.

I'm glad I found this picture tonight. It probably needs to go in a baby book or something. Too bad she doesn't have one. Poor second child. Not that Heath's is much better. He HAS a book. There are SOME things written in it. Things I wrote before he was born. But I never got around to embracing the idea of recording every little milestone. I wish I had. I think I was too tangled up in the day to day nuances that I found it too daunting to step back and observe what was happening. Or maybe the book didn't ask me the right questions.

It did not ask:

What day did your baby turn into a screaming, colicky mess?

Does your baby have any food allergies that are detected in your breastmilk, making it impossible to enjoy the motherly act of nursing, but there is no way you're going to quit, so you'll just take everything out of your diet?

What day did your N-I-P-P-L-E-S finally heal and you didn't wince in agony every time your baby latched on?

Even though they're only 22 months aparts, I find it hard to remember a lot of the details that occured with Heath, as I'm going through them with Stella. I know I gave him rice cereal around 5 months. I did the same with her. I know he was crawling (it was really more of a worm-like motion) some ridiculously early time, like 5 months. She never crawled. She scooted. He was walking way before she did. I think, around 10 or 11 months. He had his first lollipop when he was over two years old. She had hers when she was almost 4 months old. Heath gave her his watermelon flavored Dum-Dum when they were in the baby jogger. When I realized it was in her mouth, she'd already managed to suck most of it away. I've never seen a stickier, or happier, face.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that whether or not I am a good mom isn't contingent on how detailed my baby books are--or that I even have one for all of them.

On an entirely different note, we cashed in on a free New Release at Blockbuster. Inglorious Basterds. We shall see.