Back to the Real World

And then there were three

Lily starts daycare on Monday and I return to work on Wednesday, so you could say that it's the end of an era here in the Handfelt household...and it's a real bummer. Over the last twelve weeks, so much has happened and I feel like I've been living in some sort of foggy dream world. Hence, no Handfelt Happy Hour posts for weeks...

At first, I was so bored sitting at home in the days around Christmas, huge, waddling around, and tired of playing the waiting game for our little gal to arrive. Ben and I have always ate out a lot and gone to the movies frequently over our nine years together, but I think we reached the pinnacle that week as far as highest concentration of eating out/movie going was concerned. I swear, we went to the movies nearly every day trying to occupy our time. And the HHH blog consisted of way too many pictures of our meals. Then Lily arrived and rocked our world. I remember her being laid on my chest after she was born and looking up at me (with what I know now is one of her "classic" Lily looks) with her big inquisitive eyes and pink bow-shaped lips (and long luscious mullet-like locks). She looked so serious! And we just looked at each other, wondering who in the heck each other was and what we were all about.

Who is this little person?

Then, we got home...and for the first few weeks, the days and nights were a blur...and I REALLY wondered who Lily was. I felt like she was this tiny, fragile, cute stranger, that somehow was all mine (and Ben's, of course). Sometimes yelling at me with a red face, often sleeping with little cute snores, grunts, and squeaks, usually looking around all curiously, and always eating. Oh man, was she ALWAYS eating. We documented everything, taking pictures of her at 3am in the morning (and us, sometimes showing up in the background all groggy and bed-heady...we grabbed sleep whenever we could, and in a moment of desperation, I pulled out the vacuum in the middle of the night to create some "white noise" (which apparently helps babies sleep, according to Dr. Harvey Karp). Too bad for our neighbors! Hey, I figured the sound of a vacuum was at least marginally better than the wailing of a baby's cries. And it worked.

One of Lily's first smiles

Things got much easier once Lily became about six weeks old. We started to understand each other. She began smiling at us with a huge, joyous, carefree, toothless grin. It is literally the best thing ever. She talk/coos to us, and I swear, she is saying "I love you" in her baby language. We're still documenting everything and just caught her first audible laugh on video. She is such a happy baby, but still gives us those classic serious and inquisitive looks all the time. Check out all of our personal pictures from this wild journey here.

Likes:

• Being held upright and carried around (dear God, do NOT set her down or stand still no matter what you do! Constantly be on the move. Narrate what you are doing and where you are going. Check out Lil's inquisitive facial expression. She is taking it all in.)
• Being read the book "Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?"
• Being sung the "Lily Lily Lily Bryn" song by Auntie Gretchen
• Being swaddled in her magical swaddle blanket from her Pseudo-Aunts Jami and Jen
• Foot kisses from Mom (She receives approximately 5,000 kisses daily.)
• Bath time with Dad and Pedro (her whale shaped baby bathtub)

Dislikes:

• Driving slow (See a video of us stuck in Chicago traffic at the end of this post)
• Pacifiers (Any attempt at inserting a "binky" in her mouth results in fake gagging, and no one needs that)
• Being held in a cradle position (Vertical only, please! And walking around is preferred.)

Things are really looking up these days

So Lily is almost three months old and now we're all jumping back into the real world...off to daycare, back to work, and hopefully into some sort of daily routine. To celebrate the three month mark, we took Lily to get some professional pictures taken this weekend, and you can check out a few of them on our photographer's blog. We'll post more once we get the rest. Wish us luck as feel our way through this new time in our lives!