Dear Elisabeth,

It’s now been nearly two weeks since you actually turned three months old, but we’ve been a little busy what with cleaning and packing and traveling to the United States, getting a little settled in, your mummy getting 24-hour stomach flu, your daddy getting hit by a drunk driver while riding in Jude’s car (we’re so glad he wasn’t hurt!) and then going off to Texas for South by Southwest leaving mummy a single parent for five days… It’s been a little nuts to say the least. You’ve pretty much been the happy, easy going kid we’ve come to know through all of it, though. Thank you!

At three months old you are gradually developing your ability to communicate your needs and wants – which means you fuss and cry a little more often than you used to, but you are still a really, really great baby. You are happy to hang out in your bouncy chair or propped up on the sofa for long periods of time and just look around at everything around you. You are very curious, and you like to be where the action is.

In the last couple of weeks you’ve made some big steps developmentally. You’ve suddenly become much more smiley, which gives me no end of pleasure! Up until about two and half weeks ago, the only person you ever smiled at was your daddy – although you did regularly smile at inanimate objects that made you happy such as our living room curtains and a strip of brightly coloured cloth covering a futon that I was sitting on while feeding you. Then you finally started smiling at me too, and now you smile at just about anyone who stops and talks to you and pays attention to you. You’ve become much chattier too, and especially in the evening when you’re relaxed and content, your daddy and I sometimes have long “conversations” with you. You are incredibly cute when you are trying to talk to us.

You have become interested in other babies and kids, and you will spend a long time staring at Callum, the 7-month-old son of Trevor & Jenna Henderson (your American godparents) who we’re staying with in Nashville. You also get very excited looking at and talking to the baby in the mirror while playing on the baby gym at Hendersons’ house. Today for the first time while playing on the gym, you reached out and grabbed a dangling toy and held onto it for a while.

Perhaps the development that has been most helpful to me is the fact that you’ve been sleeping 8-9 hours in a row at night in the last week! I’m not expecting that to happen every night, but to know that you can and will do it even if inconsistently is wonderful.

In the past month, there have been several occasions when I’ve been away from you for long periods of time. I had an all-day Greenbelt meeting which meant leaving you alone with your daddy for 12 hours. It was really hard to leave you in the morning, but we both did fine, and your daddy managed to survive the day too. Then a few days later, your daddy and I went out together (to see Fleet Foxes at the Camden Roundhouse) leaving you with your first babysitters – your Uncle Matthew and his girlfriend Anna. Matthew and Anna both think you are pretty wonderful, so we were quite comfortable leaving you with them. You were a very good baby for them, and I think they had a fun time too! And then to help me out when I was getting ready to go on our trip, your Nana and Grandad took you with them to the British Museum for the afternoon. I think Nana really enjoyed giving you a bottle in the middle of the Babylon exhibit.

The range of songs that I sing to you is gradually broadening, and your current favourites are “Do Re Mi” and “Old MacDonald Had A Farm”. I am certain that a couple of times you have tried to sing along. So far you are fairly ambivalent about books, but I’m sure you’re appreciation for them will grow.

You are a breathtakingly gorgeous kid, Elisabeth and I swear you just get more beautiful by the day. I am incredibly privileged to be your mummy!

On Thursday the 12th of February, James, Elisabeth and I trekked to Mayfair to the US Embassy in order to register Elisabeth’s US citizenship and apply for her US passport. Once we got to the embassy, the whole process was fairly straightforward and quick, but we found that the information that we got from the embassy and on their website was not very helpful. Some of the information was incomplete or misleading and some of it was just incorrect. So I wanted to post this in the hopes that it might help other people in the future.

One of the things that the embassy thoroughly communicates is that mobile phones or any electronic devices are not allowed inside the embassy. They suggest leaving such things at left luggage facilities at one of the major train stations (Victoria being the closest). And I suppose if you drive to the embassy, you could leave mobile phones in your car. (Where you would park, I have no idea.) Since we weren’t thrilled with the thought of leaving our phones and James’ laptop at a left luggage facility and we don’t have a car (we wouldn’t drive into town anyway) and we weren’t about to leave our phones at home, James ended up leaving early and bringing our phones to his office in Shoreditch. When we got to the embassy, we discovered that actually we could have left our phones at security. That was a frustrating discovery to say the least. James probably wouldn’t have been able to leave his laptop at security, but we wouldn’t have needed to traverse the city separately sans mobile phones.

One of the things we were told we needed to provide was proof of our plans to travel on March 8th. Since we hadn’t thought to print out our e-ticket confirmation before the day of the appointment and don’t have a functioning printer at home, another reason for James’ early morning sprint to his office was to use his office printer. When we got to the embassy we discovered that they provide both computers and printers. So both reasons for James making the trip to his office before the appointment were both not necessary after all. Grrr. In the end, they didn’t even ask to see the proof of travel. It’s probably still wise to bring proof of travel along, but it’s good to know that if necessary, it’s possible to print things at the embassy.

Another source of stress for us that morning was that we both forgot to bring our cheque book to pay the fee. James spent 15 minutes running around Mayfair looking for a cash machine while Elisabeth and I waited outside the embassy. NB: If you even find yourself in Mayfair needing cash, just go straight to Oxford Street. There apparently are no cash machines in Mayfair. Even the Post Office in Grosvenor Street doesn’t have one. It seems that the limosine drivers just hold the residents’ cash for them. In any case, when we got to the payment window we found out that they don’t take cheques anyway, but they do take cash (pounds or dollars) and they do take credit cards. Had we known credit cards were a acceptable form of payment, James wouldn’t have wasted all that time running around looking for cash and again, we would have been spared some stress.

Finally, the instructions tell you to bring along a Special Delivery envelope to have the passport mailed back to you. I stopped at the post office on the way to the appointment to get a Special Delivery envelope, so we did have that with us. Then the first person who processed our application told us to go down to the lobby to buy a courier envelope which we did. It turns out that since we had the Special Delivery envelope, the courier envelope was redundant. Thankfully we were able to get a refund for the courier envelope which was a good thing because it cost £14.50 compared to £5.05 for the Special Delivery envelope.

While the morning could have been much less stressful than it was, ultimately we were successful in getting Elisabeth registered as a US citizen and applying for her passport. And her passport arrived in the post two days ago so we now have that in hand. We’re very much looking forward to getting her first stamp in her passport on March 8th!

Since Helen from Cheeky Wipes was so kind as to drop by my blog and leave a tip about warming up the wipes, I thought I would put up a little advertisement here.

About a month ago one of my friends from our NCT class sent around a link about Cheeky Wipes – re-usable wipes that you wash rather than using disposable ones that end up in landfills. Being a person who tries to live a conscientious and eco-friendly lifestyle, I thought this sounded like a good idea, so I ordered a starter pack.

I have to say I’ve been very impressed. Helen has put together a great product! The starter pack includes a pile of cloth wipes, two tubs – one for clean wipes and one for mucky ones, two different types of essential oil – one for each tub, a mesh bag to line the mucky wipes tub that can then be lifted right out and put in the wash, and two bags to take wipes on the go – one for clean wipes and one for mucky ones.

Everything is of a high quality and incredibly convenient to use. Also, part of Helen’s philosophy of business is to treat the customer as she would want to be treated, and she certainly succeeds in providing excellent customer service. Plus her website is very nice and easy to use. If saving the planet is this easy and this nice – not to mention much more cost effective over the long term – why wouldn’t you do it?

Two thumbs up for Cheeky Wipes. Highly recommended.

Dear Elisabeth,

Today you are two months old, and I hardly know where the last two months have gone. I have a feeling I’ll be saying that monthly…

You are an incredible joy to me and your daddy. We can hardly believe how lucky we are to be your parents. You are such a good baby! You hardly ever cry except when you’re hungry and impatient with waiting to get fed. Sometimes you get upset when you’re uncomfortable or want a change of scene or to be picked up, but you are never inconsolable. Most of the time you are content and happy and utterly delightful. You are a gorgeous child too – at least fifty times a day I tell you how beautiful and gorgeous and adorable and sweet you are! You are cutest when you are engaged and curious and into what’s going on around you.

Things you especially like include:

• Riding in your buggy – most of the time you sleep but when you’re awake you look around curiously at everything passing by. You don’t like stopping, especially when there’s not much to see, and you can be quite vocal and insistent in your desire to get moving again.
• Lying on your changing table – unless you are really hungry, you look around and kick happily and generally look quite delighted to be lying on your changing table while your daddy or I change your nappy. For the first few weeks of your life you really didn’t like having a new nappy put on, but you seem to have gotten past that. Now you just don’t like the cold wipes. I don’t really blame you.
• Your daddy – Oh my word, you love your daddy, and it’s so cute the way you do! You stare and stare at him. You look to see where he’s gone when he goes out of your eyesight. And sometimes if he’s sitting next to me on the sofa when I’m trying to feed you, you stop eating to look over at him. The feeling is obviously mutual, and it makes me so happy to watch the two of you together.
• Eating – You eat with gusto, little girl! Often you are so excited about eating, though, you have a hard time staying latched on and occasionally get sprayed in the face. You take it all in stride.
• Mummy singing to you – I sing you songs from The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady as well as Sunday School songs that my mommy sang to me when I was your age. You seem to especially like “Do Re Mi” and “Edelweiss”.

This week when you turned two months old has been a week of lots of firsts. We finally started putting you in cloth nappies this week. They make you a lot more bulky but other than that are working out fine so far. You took a bottle (with mummy’s milk in it) from your daddy for the first time. You slept for six hours in a row during the night shattering your previous record of four and a half hours. And you got your first round of immunisations.

I love you so much, Elisabeth. I’m so glad you’re my daughter. And I’m so looking forward to seeing all the new things you will do in the next month!

Elisabeth at 8 weeks

Ever since Elisabeth was 13 days old, we have been bundling her up in her snowsuit, tucking her into her buggy, sling, car seat or – more recently – Baby Bjorn, and taking her out and about. Some places Elisabeth has been in her 7 1/2 weeks of life:

St Luke’s – we first took Elisabeth to church when she was 16 days old. It happened to be the Sunday of the kids’ nativity play. Elisabeth was very cuddled and cooed over after the service, and a number of people commented that in three years time, she might be up there as one of the sheep (which were played by the congregation’s three-year-olds). We were just glad that we hadn’t agreed to have Elisabeth play the baby Jesus this year when we saw how the four-year-old Mary yanked around the baby Jesus doll.

Mamas and babies group – the couples in our birth preparation classes really bonded over the course of the seven weeks that the class met and since then, the mothers from the group – and babies as they’ve been making their appearances – have been meeting weekly for lunch at a cafe in Crouch End. I really enjoy having a group of other new mothers to get together with regularly, and it’s fun to see how the other babies grow and change from week to week.

All Hallows & the Greenbelt offices – I am administering the talks programme for Greenbelt this year and so have had quite a few meetings at All Hallows just this month. One of them was on Inauguration Day, and when I arrived they had all the lights off in the Greenbelt office and were projecting the Inauguration ceremony on the wall. That was a great way to watch it! I kept telling Elisabeth how significant it was and how cool it was that she would never know a time when there hadn’t been an African American president. She seemed more interested in eating. Oh well. Some day she’ll get it.

Our local pub, the Salisbury – When Elisabeth was just a few weeks old, our good friends Matt & Clare (who are also Elisabeth’s godparents) phoned us up and asked if we wanted to join them at the pub for a pint. Since it’s just down around the corner, we put her in her snowsuit and James just carried her there. She had a drink at the pub too (of mama’s milk, not beer – not for 18 years yet, please dear).

Cambridge – On December 19th when Elisabeth was 15 days old, James’ parents came and picked us up and drove us to James’ grandad’s flat in Cambridge where we were joined by James’ Uncle Louis, Aunt Martha and two of their sons, Daniel & Christopher, Martha’s mother Carol, and James’ Uncle Alex. We had a lovely lunch with all of them and they all very much enjoyed meeting Elisabeth. Martha, who was in a back brace due to a bicycle accident, still managed to spend a good bit of time holding Elisabeth. She was still only about 6 1/2 pounds then so it wasn’t too hard. Delightfully, we were able to take a photo of four generations of Stewarts.

Hampton-in-Arden (near Solihull) – James and I were supposed to go to his Aunt Sheila and Uncle Ian’s house for the Ganjavi family Christmas gathering on Saturday, December 13th. Those plans had been made when we thought it unlikely that we’d have a baby yet on that date. Whoops! Since Elisabeth was still just nine days old on the 13th, we decided to stay home and try to get together with the family at a later date. A gathering for Baba’s (James’ grandfather) birthday on January 2nd proved the perfect opportunity. Again James’ parents picked us up and drove us to Hamton-in-Arden. As with the trip to Cambridge, Elisabeth slept in her car seat almost the whole trip. The Ganjavi family loved meeting Elisabeth as well, and this time it was Baba who spent the most time holding her.

Tunbridge Wells – After the day with the Ganjavis, James’ parents drove us to their house in Tunbridge Wells where Elisabeth had her first overnight away from home. On Saturday I got to do a good bit of shopping in town while Elisabeth’s Nana (James’ mum) watched her. I came back from shopping expecting to find a baby girl wailing with hunger, but she wasn’t even there! She was out for a walk with Nana and quite happy about it apparently. On Sunday we took Elisabeth to James’ parents’ church where she was introduced a lot more people who oo-ed and ah-ed over her. To get back to London that evening, we were driven to the train station, then took a train back to London Bridge, then a bus back home. Elisabeth slept pretty much the whole time.

The bowling lanes at Shoreditch House member’s only club – our friend Beki Bateson had invited us to help her celebrate her birthday on January 20th at Shoreditch House. Did we let having a seven-week-old baby stop us from joining the party? No way! Elisabeth spent most of the time at the party cuddling with our friend Gill who has a number of grandchildren herself and thinks babies are the best.

Hackney – We have lots of friends who live in Hackney and we end up spending quite a bit of time there. We regularly join our friends the Turners for their Monday evening open house suppers and took Elisabeth there for the first time on January 12th. They were thrilled to bits about meeting Elisabeth and she got lots of cuddling that evening as well as some adorable shoes made by Burmese craftspeople and a stuffed elephant from Sri Lanka. We were back in Hackney – just up the street from Turners – on the 18th for Sunday lunch with our friends Joe & Annabelle. They are expecting their first baby in July, and we are excited for Elisabeth and their little one to grow up together!

We are very much looking forward to Elisabeth’s first airplane journey which she will take on March 8th when we fly to Nashville. We can’t wait for her to meet her American family and lots of friends in the States!

The previous entry is a fairly detailed and lengthy description of Elisabeth’s birth. I’m happy for family and friends to read it, but because of the personal nature, have made it only viewable with a password. If you would like to read it, please contact me for the password via email, Twitter dm, mobile, Facebook… or leave a comment here (with your email address) and I will send it to you. Thanks!

Before I get too far into blogging about Elisabeth and how amazing and wonderful and clever she is and how lucky and awed we are as parents, I want to take a few moments to reflect a bit on my experience of pregnancy.

If I had to sum up how I felt about pregnancy in one sentence, it would simply be this: I loved being pregnant. As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, first trimester wasn’t brilliant. It could have been a lot worse, though. And it’s rather easy to forget the bad bits of it given how good I felt through the rest of the pregnancy.

A few of the things that I loved about pregnancy:

• The miracle of being able to grow a whole new person inside you is really astounding and something that you comprehend in a whole new way when you experience it. We were quite lucky to have four ultrasound scans (rather than the usual two) – at 10, 14, 21 and 34 weeks – and it was amazing to see this little person growing before our eyes.
• I felt really sexy. For the first time in years (decades?) I wasn’t embarrassed about my poochy tummy and actually felt really attractive in my body. I’m sure that was helped by the fact that I lost a lot of weight early on and didn’t gain it all back until the week Elisabeth was born (net weight gain for the pregnancy = 0) so while my tummy got nice and round, the rest of me got rather more svelte.
• Feeling a baby’s movement inside me and having those movements get stronger and stronger. Elisabeth was quite an active baby in utero, and I loved every kick and punch and scritch and squirm. James and I both revelled in the interaction with Elisabeth while she was in my womb. In a way it gave her a distinct personality before we knew who she was – or even that she was a she!
• The anticipation of it all! I am someone who often enjoys the anticipation of an experience as much as (and sometimes more than) the experience itself. I’m glad we decided not to find out in advance whether we were having a girl or boy because it just added to that sense of anticipation. By the time I reached 35 weeks I was feeling very psychologically ready to find out who the little person inside me was, so I’m quite happy not to have had to wait longer than I did, but that anticipation while it lasted was so enjoyable. Now we have a different sort of anticipation – what will Elisabeth learn to do next, what sort of person will she become, etc?

I was really very lucky to have had such an easy pregnancy. I had a few flare-ups of heartburn and intermittent sciatic pain but there are a whole lot of symptoms that many women experience late in pregnancy – swollen hands, ankles and feet; backaches; piles; nausea; insomnia; etc – that I never had to deal with. I kept waiting for the really uncomfortable stage of late pregnancy to set in and it never did. Maybe it would have if I carried Elisabeth to full term, but I was still feeling great when I reached 36 weeks. My body just seemed meant for growing a baby!

And now we have our precious little girl and our lives have been changed forever. I couldn’t be happier about this amazing Christmas present that we have received this year – the best one I’ve ever gotten!

Our beautiful daughter, Elisabeth Soraya Clare Stewart, made her unexpected arrival (unexpected both because she was 3 1/2 weeks early and because James and I were sure she would be a boy) into the world on Thursday, the 4th of December 2008. Following is the announcement email that we sent out to family and friends the day after she was born:

We’re very pleased to let you know that our daughter Elisabeth Soraya Clare Stewart was born last night, December 4th, at 7.13pm after an intense but relatively short labour, all beginning at 11pm on Wednesday evening when Kari’s water broke shortly after going to bed. We headed to the hospital to get checked out, and since she was still four days short of full term, they decided to keep Kari around. It’s just as well that they did, because once labour really got going early in the afternoon on Thursday, it wasn’t long at all before Elisabeth made her grand entrance. Kari didn’t even have time for any pain killer other than a couple of paracetemol (Tylenol)/codeine tablets. Pushing lasted all of about 20 minutes.

Although four weeks early she is in very good health and weighed in at a quite respectable 5lbs 3oz and is 46 cm long. Mum and dad are tired but very happy and very much looking forward to introducing her to the world outside the Whittington Hospital (in North London).

Since Elisabeth arrived as early and small as she did (and as long as she did after the water breaking), she’s having 48 hours of antibiotic treatment which involves having her arm wrapped up in a foam splint to keep the IV tube from getting knocked about too much. The premature birth also means that she hasn’t quite gotten the hang of sucking and feeding and has a feeding tube in her nose. These combined factors mean that Kari and Elisabeth are having an extra-long hospital stay and will probably not go home until Sunday at the earliest. (The extra-care treatment also means that they got a private room which is a great blessing!) We’re looking forward to – hopefully – taking a tube-free baby home with us.

Since we are on a mobile wireless connection at the hospital, we haven’t attempted to upload more than one photo of Elisabeth yet, but you can see her just a few minutes old at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jystewart/3083876687/. More photos will be on Flickr soon once James has a chance to get online with a faster connection.

A note about her names for those who are curious:

Elisabeth is a name we like partly because it has lots and lots of possible nicknames. She may end up being called Lizzie or Elsa or something else… or maybe just Elisabeth. We’ll see what she grows into. Kari had a great-grandmother Elizabeth who was known as Lizzie. Elisabeth also recalls one of Kari’s literary heroines, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Bennett. We just happened to prefer the spelling with an “s”.

Soraya is an name which is very popular in Iran. James’ mother had a very close friend named Soraya when she was growing up in Iran. We’ve heard a couple of different possible sources of the name. One is that it’s the Persian version of the Hebrew name Sarah and means “princess”. Another possibility is that it’s the Arabic name for the same star cluster that in Persian are called Parvin which is James’ mother’s name.

Clare is for our dear friend Clare Patterson who, along with her husband Matt, was the first person (besides us) to know that a baby was on the way. Clare also has the good fortune of having a name that we happened to really like. [Addendum to the original email: when we were first discussing the name Clare, our intention was also that it be in honour of Kari's grandmother, Clara Stoel, who died in June 2006.]

We can’t wait for you to meet her! We’re planning to be Stateside for most of March and the first week or so of April, at least spending time in Nashville, Indiana, Chicago and Grand Rapids. We look forward to seeing many of you and introducing you to our sweet baby girl then.

We are very much looking forward to spending the Christmas season basking in the arrival of our precious gift!

Pictures are constantly being added to Flickr, so go on over and have a look. We think she’s rather stunning – not that we’re at all biased or anything!

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.