The Harris Family

Hats.

We were led to believe that babies love hats. Wherever we go, we see infants with cute little hats on, reclining docilely in their carriers, sleeping quietly.

Not Elsa. Elsa hates hats. If you put one on, she’ll squirm around until the hat is off. Pretty much the same for socks, mittens, and anything else remotely removable. This episode’s set of pictures includes a cute vignette of Elsa delighting in her flowered hat.

Also this week, we tried out Elsa’s new rubber ducky bath tub for the first time. It’s inflatable, and quacks when you touch the nose. It was pretty successful; Elsa likes warm bath water. The process of getting her out of the bath, on the other hand, is something Lynne and I haven’t fully optimized yet, and the transition out of the ducky was not seamless. Elsa is not shy about letting us know when she doesn’t like something, although she’s getting better about not always crying, but instead loudly “talking” to us to express displeasure.

We put Elsa back on her blanket recently to visualize how much bigger she’s gotten in the six weeks since we took the original blanket photo. You’ll find that photo in this set as well.

Elsa – Week 11

Last week, I finally went back to work, so hopefully the flow of photos and videos won’t slow down too much. We have a few things in the hopper that we’ll post when we have a few more free minutes.

It’s hard to believe Elsa is already over two months old!

It seems like just yesterday we brought her home from the hospital and started adjusting to a new member of the family. Now, two months later, it’s hard to imagine what life was like before she was here.

Some things have remained the same. Elsa was a big baby when she was born, and as of her two-month checkup, that hasn’t changed. She’s tracking in a high percentile for length, weight, and (especially) head circumference. She still has blue eyes, although they’ve changed from a dark, almost gray-blue when she was born to a brighter, lighter shade. We’ll know by mid-summer or not whether she’ll keep the blue eyes or develop brown eyes like her mother did.

Elsa’s hair, on the other hand, has gotten progressively lighter. Looking at the pictures from shortly after her birth, the change is very evident. Right now, I’d describe her hair as either light brown or dark blond. Because it’s so thin and sparse, it’s hard to really tell though.

Elsa is a very spirited baby and loves to be awake, talking and commanding social attention. She love to play, smile, and chat, but like most infants, she is also prone to over-excitement. We’ve read that two-month-old infants should be sleeping 15-18 hours per day, but Elsa rarely takes more than a few short naps through the course of the day. Happily, though, over the last couple of weeks Elsa has started to dependably wind down around 8 or 8:30pm and to sleep through 7am or so (with only one or two interspersed feedings.) She’s usually good for at least one 5- or 6-hour contiguous sleep period during the night, which is a godsend.

Here are a few pictures of Elsa wearing one of the shirts Lynne herself wore back in the early 1980s:

Elsa – Week 10

As Elsa comes up on two months old, she’s starting to exhibit all sort of new behaviors and skills. It seems that she learns something new almost every day now.

Since she was a few weeks old, Elsa would do little bits of “baby talk,” but over the last two weeks she’s become downright chatty. She’ll sit in her chair and talk and talk with us, sometimes for a half hour at a time. We don’t know exactly what she’s saying, but she’s markedly expressive and animated, both in her vocal inflections and her facial expressions.

She’s also learning to reliably grasp her first object: a beautiful silver rattle that was a gift from Lynne’s cousin Carolyn and her family Harry, Michael (our ring bearer), and David. It’s just the perfect size for her little hands to clasp, and it makes an entrancing jingling sound which she loves.

All that said, what Elsa is most interested in is trying to figure out a way to stick the rattle in her mouth.

She’s not quite coordinated enough to target her mouth accurately yet (not to mention that her mouth is way too small to fit the rattle in anyway), but we are consistently amused with watching her try.

Here are a few minutes of video of Elsa playing around with her rattle:

As we were preparing to give Elsa a bath a few days ago, I set her on the bed in just her diaper.

She was happy: playing, kicking, punching and smiling. It’s amazing how much bigger and more regularly interactive she’s gotten in just six-and-a-half weeks!

We’re giving her real baths now (not just sponge baths), and while Elsa seemed disinclined to like the water initially, by the end of her first bath she was enjoying herself cautiously. That is, at least, until we briefly put her head in the water…

Here are a few action shots of Elsa lounging on the bed prior to her soak:

On the Bed

Elsa’s had a fun week so far this week!

We took a short outing to Phantom Lake, where we strolled her along the gravel trail. She seemed to enjoy everything except the ride home. Most babies (we hear) love riding in the car, but Elsa merely tolerates it. What she does not tolerate, however, is red lights. As soon as the car rolls to a stop, Elsa cries in protest until we start up again. Suffice it to say that we are learning which routes have fewer stops and how to slowly roll into red lights with the hope that they’ll be green before we get to the intersection!

Elsa laughed for the first time yesterday at a funny face Lynne was making. Her smiles are becoming more frequent, especially in the morning when she’s generally in her best mood of the day.

As a sort of warm-up for Valentine’s Day, we put on Elsa’s “pink hearts” outfit yesterday for the first time. She looked so cute that I had to take a few snapshots!

Pretty in Pink

I’ve posted a lot of close-up pictures of Elsa, and thus it’s easy to lose sight of how small she really is.

Here’s a picture of her lying on our smallish rug in our living room:

It’s hard to believe that Elsa’s a month old now. Time really flies, especially time in which you’re getting so little sleep and so much of what you’re doing every day is brand new.

Traditionally, when babies leave the hospital, parents put them in some sort of darling “going home outfit.” We planned to do the same, a little pink-and-brown knit number that Lynne bought a few months ago.

Well, now imagine we’re in the hospital getting ready to leave. We’ve never put baby clothes on before, we’ve got this screaming infant we don’t know how to calm, and this knit outfit that fits snugly over her head and has a million snaps and intricate buttons. Suffice to say, we gave up in about 5 seconds and put on the biggest, simplest thing we could find.

A month later, we’re a bit better at putting on the baby clothes, and since Clay and Victoria were coming over to visit, we thought we’d celebrate her one-month birthday by putting on her going-home outfit, one month late.

We took some pictures of her, of course…

Going Home Outfit

Elsa’s great-aunt Jannie sent us a beautiful, personalized cross stich blanket for Elsa with her name and vital statistics on it. We couldn’t resist putting her on top of it and taking a picture for posterity.

Last week, it was nice enough one day that we deicded to take Elsa on her first walk to the park.

We went to Crossroads Park near our house and spent an hour or so walking along the paved trail.

It was sunny but fairly chilly, so we put a furry attachment over the stroller to keep Elsa warm. Only a little hole for her head was all that was left exposed to the elements.

Elsa slept though most of the walk, but I’m sure somewhere down deep she appreciated the fresh air. We certainly did!

Elsa’s First Trip to the Park

For Christmas, my mom had our family’s old 8mm home movies converted to a DVD.

There are 9 movies in all, starting with Christmas 1978 and ending with Christmas 1985. Because the movies have no sound, it’s sometimes a trifle difficult to tell what’s going on, so these will probably be interesting only to people who are actually in them.

My dad only appears in one of them because he’s the one who was (manually) cranking the camera.

I thought it would be fun to post the movies to the web so that everyone could watch them easily.

Read the rest of this entry »

When Jensen’s parents were in town a few weeks ago, we took Elsa on her first trip to a restaurant.

We visited 0/8 Seafood Grill at late lunchtime, when there were relatively few people around to disturb. As it turned out, Elsa was nonplussed by the entire event and, as long as she got fed when she wanted, she was very agreeable.

Here are a few pictures from the trip:

Elsa’s First Restaurant

A couple of weeks ago we broke down and bought a swing for Elsa.

Before she was born, we didn’t intend to get one. But after about ten days, we realized we needed every ally we could muster in the ongoing campaign to stave off crying.

It’s not the fanciest swing on the market, but it can move side-to-side or front-to-back, and it has a bunch of scary features we don’t use, like fake cricket sounds and a rotating disco ball of stuffed animals.

Sometimes Elsa loves it and occasionally she hates it, but overall it has been successful at keeping her happy for a few minutes a day.

Here’s some video I shot this afternoon of Elsa contentedly hanging out in her swing:

Over the last two weeks, both sets of grandparents were in town to meet Elsa for the first time.

First Jensen’s parents came from Ohio, and then Lynne’s parents, sister, and grandma came from New Jersey. All of the family overlapped for one night, which we celebrated by taking everyone to Purple in Woodinville.

Here are some pictures of grandparents (and a great-grandmother!) with Elsa:

Meeting the Grandparents