Dear Elisabeth,

Before I go any farther, let me just acknowledge that I missed writing you a four-month letter. You turned four months old while we were in the US and it was in the midst of a lot of busyness, and things didn’t really calm down much after we got home. Besides I wrote your last letter at 3 1/2 months old, so at least it’s a consistent time period between updates. In any case…

Earlier last week you turned five months old. You weighed in at 14 lb 2 oz – still right on the 25th percentile line. It’s a little hard to believe that you are that small for your age because you are such a little chub. You certainly don’t look small, even compared to the other babies in our NCT group who are the same age as you. As far as I am concerned, you are a perfectly proportioned baby.

Besides “gorgeous”, the words that people use most often to describe you are “alert”, “switched-on” and “intelligent”. You are incredibly curious, and you are constantly looking around you, taking everything in. You can study people with startling intensity. (You could easily win a staring contest!) Your curiosity means that you get bored very quickly, however, making you a rather high maintenance baby. I can’t just put you down and expect that you’ll be happy for 1/2 hour on your own. Often after just two minutes you are howling for a change of scene. You’re happier in your bouncy seat than lying on your back since it lets you look around more. But even there you get bored after ten minutes or so.

Your curiosity extends to other babies now. Most of the time you delightedly smile and chat to the “baby in the mirror”. (Sometimes you just can’t be bothered – there are too many other interesting things around to look at.) You also smile and reach towards the other babies in our NCT group.

You do really enjoy being outside and still love going for rides in your buggy. Unlike the first few months of your life, though, you spend most of the time in the buggy awake  now, studying what’s going on around you. You like books, although you have limited patience for sitting and reading. And you’re getting more into playing with toys although you often get frustrated when you can’t get them in your mouth or when they fall out of reach. Then you throw mini “tantrums” — you throw yourself backwards and start howling because you can’t get what you want. I’m looking forward to you being able to sit up by yourself and being just a little bit mobile so you can get to your toys yourself.

You still don’t really like being on your tummy, but you love standing up and your leg strength is quite impressive. You can push yourself up to standing from a crouching position without any help and will sometimes stand for a few seconds with help for balance but no real support. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if you skipped crawling and went right to walking.

Your sleeping is still all over the place. While we were in the US in March and the beginning of April you were consistently sleeping 8 1/2 to 9 1/2 hours in a row, waking up for a feed, then sleeping another 2-3. Since we gotten back you’ve had more nights of waking up two or three times during the night which may be because of teething or just settling back in. The last couple of nights you’ve gone back to sleeping 8-9 hours before having a feed, then down for another 2-3, though, so I’m hoping that will continue for a while. Your daytime naps are pretty erratic too. Most of your naps are 30-45 minutes long, but every now and then you’ll take a long nap — up to three hours in a row — during the day. You’ve had a bad cold for the last couple of days and have been sleeping lots (not so much in your bed, though — mostly on your daddy or me or on the sofa). Which is fine with me!

Now that you have had a couple of bad colds and some spells of teething pain, I’m finding out how hard it is for parents to see their kids in pain or struggling. I just want to you be healthy and happy and okay!

You are generally a happy, delightful little girl. When your daddy or I go to get you out of bed in the morning, you give us big smiles which just melt our hearts every time. You can be pretty talkative — especially when you are getting your nappy changed — and you love it when we echo your sounds. You love it when I sing to you, and some of your favourite songs are “Old MacDonald” and “Skip To My Lou” (to which I add a verse “Elisabeth Soraya Clare, won’t you be my darling”). I think that sometimes you even “sing” too. You have such a sweet voice, and we love hearing it!

You are the light of my life sweetheart. I can’t imagine life without you!

Elisabeth at five months

So this is the first entry on this blog in 4 1/2 months which is rather shameful. I’ve been meaning to put something up for about 3 months now. And I think there’s just been so much to say that I’ve been a bit paralysed… where to even begin? So I will just sum up.

First of all, as the five people who still pay any attention to this blog are already fully aware, we’re expecting our first child at the end of December. I knew this when I wrote the last entry way back in early May, but it was too early to be public news then. And now I’m 5 1/2 months pregnant, and my ever-growing bump makes it all too apparent.

First trimester wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it was certainly no picnic. I didn’t experience all that much nausea – and when I did it was usually only late at night – but I just felt really blecch every evening. The most annoying symptom was that I felt ravenously hungry all the time but there were very few foods that I actually had any desire to eat with the result that I lost about eight pounds during the first trimester. (Here’s The Kid at 14 weeks.)

The day I started my second trimester it was like a switch flipped and suddenly I just felt normal again which was such a relief! And with just a week and a half left to go, second trimester has been great! I don’t have any basis for comparison, but this seems to be a very active baby. It’s not unusual for her/him (we’re not going to find out which until she/he comes out) to be kicking and wiggling most of the day whilst I’m sitting at my desk at work. The Kid seems to really like to kick its dad. Whenever it’s kicking in one place and I put my hand on my tummy it often stops. But when James puts his hand on my tummy, The Kid immediately kicks right in that spot. I’m sure those are kicks of affection rather than aggression.

So it seems inevitable that “one more voice in the human choir” will – at least to some degree – become a Baby Blog which may well mean that new content appears on it with greater regularity. We shall see.

August was a fun but slightly mad month with two weeks in the US (finally met my gorgeous niece, had a wonderful time with dear friends in Nashville, and celebrated my brother Jeffrey’s marriage to the delightful Courtney) and then five days at Greenbelt which, despite some heavy rain and rather too much time spent working, was once again a highlight of our year.

And then a week and a half after getting back from Greenbelt, we finally completed on our house! After 4 1/2 months of one delay after another, we got the keys on September 6. Two weeks on, we still have quite a lot of our stuff in boxes – mostly for lack of furniture to unpack things into – and I’m trying to be very zen about it all. It helps that we have a functional kitchen and that our living room is something of an oasis. (We got that set up within a couple of days of moving in so that we could at least go in one room, shut the door and forget about the huge pile of boxes just on the other side.) We also have a wonderful bed from Warren Evans (which we would highly recommend) and I have been sleeping remarkably well for 5 1/2 months pregnant. We still need a lot of furniture and there’s definitely work to be done in the house (the kitchen especially needs a lot of help) but it sure is wonderful to have our own place again!

I’m planning to post some house photos on Flickr soon. In the meantime, check out photos of my spectacularly adorable niece, Leah Marnae.

It’s official: I’m leaving my job. I turned in my letter of resignation yesterday. There’s a lot of reorganization and movement going on in my department right now, so even though I won’t actually be leaving until May, we’re hoping to hire my replacement within the next couple of months, and HR had to have my letter before they can post the opening. Thus, the submission of my resignation letter four months in advance of my actual departure date. It’s one more thing that makes all of this seem very real and very final. I’m sure that when May rolls around I’ll be more emotional about the whole thing, but for now I’m mostly just excited. Twelve years is long enough to work in one place, I think. I’m ready for something new!

We’re taking steps to get our house ready to sell. It’s so hard to know when to put it on the market, and we’re hoping our realtor will be able to give us some good advice about that next week. When we bought our house in 2004, it had only been on the market for six days when we put in our offer, and we had reason to believe another offer was on its way in. It’s a great house – beautifully decorated, in great shape, new furnace and automatic garage door, great back yard and deck, in a fantastic location with lots (like the Fulton Farmers Market) in easy walking distance, etc., etc. However, the housing market is a lot different now than it was three years ago, and we have no idea how long it will take to sell.

In other news, as James blogged shortly before the holidays, we’ve purchased our first (of many!) flights for our summer around-the-world trip. And last weekend we got fourteen different travel guides out of the library. Lots of reading to do in the next couple of weeks! Thank goodness for GRPL and the online renewal option.

Yes, it’s true. After two months of drought, I’m blogging again. Don’t expect a deluge, however. Things are pretty busy these days.

So in the last two months we’ve moved into our new house (photos here – click on the rooms to see them) and have been having a great old time furnishing it. We’ve also found that owning a house zaps a lot of time. It’s quite something, really. We had a lovely little housewarming party on September 25 thanks to the amazing generosity of our great realtor Linda.

Also my sister Erin got married on October 2. It was a freezing cold day for an outdoor wedding, but at least it was sunny and the reception was in a cozy, closed-in shelter house complete with a fire in the fireplace. The bride was glowing all day. It was a great celebration!

And we continue to pull together all the last-minute details for our own wedding celebration on October 22. I’m really looking forward to it, but I’m also looking forward to it being done and our lives finally slowing down a bit. It’s amazing what a hectic, busy month September was! We’ll be honeymooning in northern Michigan (Bellaire, Charlevoix, Petoskey, Mackinac, etc.) – a location neither of us has been to. Should be a good time and beautiful that time of year. And even if it rains all week, it will be a whole six days together with nothing else to do!

In the meantime, James is improving his computer programming skills and looking for work – full time or freelance. If you need a web developer and have any leads, please get in touch with him. He’s set up a portfolio (with all his contact info) over here.

That’s a summary of the news from the last two months. I’ll post after our October 22 event if not before!

p.s. No word on James’ green card yet. The vigil continues…

It’s something, huh?

James and I are in the midst of all the joy and stress of buying our first house. I’ve lived in rental properties (four different ones) since graduating from Calvin and never really even considered buying. It made sense to do so now, a major reason being that if we do eventually decide to buy a house in England we want to have some equity built up as housing costs there are astronomical – at least compared to West Michigan.

So about a month ago we contacted Linda – a friend of my aunt and uncle who is a realtor and has helped a few other members of my extended family find houses. She faxed me a list of about 34 properties in the general area that we had specified (in short, within about 10 minutes walk of central Eastown). We selected a few to look at and were at first a little discouraged about what we were finding in our price range. But then a couple came along that we were more optimistic about and could see ourselves in. We started taking second looks, and then we found it: The House.

I fell in love with it immediately upon entering and just got more excited as we walked around. The listed price was toward the top of our price range but it was in such great condition. There was nothing that needed doing immediately; the floors, paint, appliances, roof, yard – all in great shape! James was excited about it but didn’t have the immediate emotional reaction that I did – which is okay because he’s a guy.

Next comes the securing of a mortgage lender which ended up being a pretty easy process for us. One of my co-workers highly recommended her and her husband’s mortgage guy, and after meeting with him and finding out that this was actually going to cost us a lot less per month than we were expecting, we were ready to move forward. [Side note: my conversations lately have been peppered with all kinds of terms that I hadn't had a clue about a month ago like PMI, ARM, disclosure statements, etc.]

The day that we made the offer I had to work, but James and Linda spent a good two hours in the house looking around and writing up the offer – after which James was really excited about the house too. They came over to my office around 1:00 that afternoon so I could sign the offer papers too. Linda faxed them to the listing agent shortly after. And we waited. And waited. And waited… The offer expired at 10:00 p.m. Linda called us at 10:30 to say she still hadn’t heard anything. At midnight we finally went to bed. Thankfully I managed to sleep despite the suspense. Linda called at 7:30 a.m. to let us know that there had been a counter-offer. We decided to accept it. Later that evening Linda called us to let us know that she had heard from the listing agent and we were all set. Pending inspection and all that, the house would be ours.

WOOOO!!!

The tentative plan is to close sometime after July 23 and take possession the last weekend in August. I think it’s going to be a little frustrating not to be able to move in earlier, but it will all work out. We’ve been doing some furniture shopping now that we know what sort of space we have to put the furniture in. It’s a lot more fun that way!

It’s kind of strange that I’m so excited about having hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. I kinda think this is worth it though.