Welcome, Harper Quinn!

I haven’t written in over a month, and I’m trying not to feel too guilty about that fact. Between caring for a newborn, parenting a 3-year-old, getting myself moving, writing for my other gigs, and just the general holiday season, there are lots of reasons. Oh, and I don’t need to tell you guys…I’m tired, man.

But, I didn’t want to leave our new little bundle of joy out in the cold as far as a proper introduction to the world. For being bloggers, my husband and I are pretty private (him more than me), so we need to walk a fine line between over-sharing and maintaining some anonymity for our family’s safety.

I reason that we’ve shared a bit about our firstborn, so I’d like to record our secondborn’s arrival (at least to allow me to remember better). So, today, it’s all about our girl.

Yup, girl. In case you’re not in the loop, we were stunned and ecstatic to welcome an 8 lb. 2.5 oz. girl to our family the morning of Friday, November 13th via C-section.

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We agreed that she looked like a “Harper”, but took some time to land on a middle name. “Harper” means more than just “a harpist” (although my family’s musical side spoke to the name a bit); a minstrel actually was the news bringer, record keeper, and even genealogy expert of an area, which are all loosely tied to our interests and even careers.

We ended up choosing “Quinn” (rather than a family name, which I still feel guilty about – though I LOVE what we went with). It means “wisdom” and has a Gaelic/Irish history (as do I ;-)). It’s strong and special and sweet, and we hope she is, too. So far, we hit the nail on the head.

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Considering she’s 3 weeks old, her personality is starting to show itself more everyday. She’s been a sweetie from day one, but her lungs are a lot stronger (the nurses and doctor were actually concerned about her that she couldn’t get her vocals worked up and sounded rather weak). That said, we need to listen for her little chirps, squeaks and mouth noises to make sure she eats regularly.

Not to say she’s an awesome sleeper! She’s a newborn, so naps happen, but pretty sporadically, so I’m beat. She also finds it amusing to cluster feed, which I totally give into. Again, she’s a newborn; it’s what she needs. I’m just grateful that she has taken to nursing as quickly as her brother and, so far, there are no issues. Knock on all the wood, folks!!

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What about Hadley? I’m planning on writing a separate post about this, but as far as Harper’s concerned, he loves “his baby” very much. He gently pets her head, occasionally talks to her with a super sweet voice, and remembers to always include her when he talks about our family (which is often). Otherwise, we’re experiencing lots of 3-year-old, not-getting-attention-so-let’s-get-BAD-attention behavior. I feel his pain…but we’re experiencing our own pain and frustrations in the meantime.

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As with all things, it’s a work in progress and it’s a phase…just like this sleep deprived, mama cries about commercials stage. (With a history of depression, I know it’s not PPD or even baby blues; just exhaustion and hormones.) And the good outweighs the challenges, most days.

Oh, and as far as myself? I still get twinges of pain from overdoing it, but am pretty much back to normal physically. I had totally forgotten what the post-op pain was like and the first week home was rough. I have a high pain threshold, though, and made it through.

Sneezes and coughs be damned, though. Ouch.

If you’d like to know what else we’ve been up to, make sure you stop by the Thirsties blog to see how we’re changing our holiday traditions this year, among other things. And, I do hope to be sharing more here to get some normalcy back into our lives. 😉