Six Weeks

I can't believe that my baby is six weeks old. I also can't believe how wonderful but HARD it is to be a mom. I think there must be a secret motherhood pact that says no mother tells any soon-to-be mother any details of exactly how hard it is to have a baby. And I don't mean just pushing the baby out. I mean having a baby that you are totally responsible for. I was debating whether to go into detail about the challenges of being a new mom. Just in case there is a secret pact that I wasn't informed about, I don't want to risk breaking it. Instead I will just leave you with this quote from a book that saved my sanity the first few weeks with a new baby. I would recommend this book to every new mom. I wish I had read it before I had Kellyn just so I was prepared. But you may want to wait until you are up three times in the middle of the night feeding a baby and just read it then. Reading can take the place of that thing you used to do called sleeping. It's called "The Girlfriends Guide to Surviving the First Year of Motherhood" by Vicky Lovine. So here's a list from the beginning of her book. This kind of sums up my experience.

Top-Ten Biggest Shocks of Childbirth

10. How big you really got during pregnancy

9. How fat you still are when you leave the hospital

8. How messy childbirth and recovery are (she's not kidding...)

7. How frightened you are of ever having a bowel movement again in this lifetime

6. How fat your face looks in the delivery room videos and photos

5. How certain you are that you will never want sex again
4. How irresponsible the hospital was to have released this precious baby into your care, considering you'd never even changed a diaper until yesterday

3. How complicated nursing a baby really is

2. How overwhelming your devotion and enslavement to the baby are already

1. How nobody ever told you how much it really hurts to have a baby

Hopefully that doesn't scare any of you potential moms too badly. I think I know the real reason why mothers didn't tell me how hard it is. I think that you forget because it gets so good after the initial shock wears off. After six weeks I feel one million times better and I really love it. In fact, I think I'm even getting used to the idea of maybe having another child...someday...in the distant future. So here are some pictures of Kellyn from the past six weeks. She is growing so fast. And I am officially one of those people now who thinks everything their child does, whether it's smiling or blinking or moving her little finger, is the cutest thing in the world. My blog will now be filled with pictures that I think are adorable and everyone else thinks are pretty boring. But it's my blog so I can do whatever I want. Here she is!

Another newborn picture from the hospital

Wearing sunglasses at Aunt Jenny's wedding and not happy about it...hence the pouty lip.

Freezing after bath time
Hanging out in the swingKellyn and Uncle AndrewI finally caught her kind of smiling on camera. As soon as I get the camera out she quits doing whatever cute thing she was doing. She is wearing a dress her Great Grandma gave her. These are the kind of dresses my mother tortured me with as a child and now I'm doing it to Kellyn too. Poor child.
GO UTES! Unfortunately she may turn out to be a BYU fan. When I was first trying to take a picture of her in this outfit she was screaming. She wore herself out so I took this while she was sleeping. Maybe all the Happy Valley air is getting to her...



Kellyn and Dad