People have been asking for more photos…yes they’ll get here eventually…how many hours in the day do you have to sit in front of a computer while your baby’s giggling? I thought so!

Elle has been exploring textures a lot lately – last weekend she discovered the texture of Brock’s beard, and we happened to catch it on camera.

Elle has recently taken to sucking her fists. This is a good thing – it lets us know when she’s hungry (or just wants to comfort herself by sucking) before she gets so hungry that she feels the need to cry. But she can’t really fit her fist in her mouth, and we’ve been watching to see when she gets the hang of sucking just her thumb. Yesterday in the kitchen, half-asleep in her bouncy chair, we saw her do just that, briefly.

What a cutie!

Every day, Elle is becoming more active and interactive – in addition to watching people and smiling when you speak to her intently, she has started making all sorts of vocal noises, and has started happy-gasping in a sort of proto-laugh. (Right now as I write this, she is lying next to me on the sofa, happily watching Glee, waving her hands, kicking, and making peeping noises). Today, she rolled from her back to her side for the first time – a sign of new abilities on their way! She’s also been grabbing and pulling on things a lot more – especially her firefly toy.

Elle’s favorite song this week is Great-Aunt Juliet’s rendition of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm”. She also loves being spoken to in French.

Although Elle began smiling to herself around her fourth week, she’s finally begun smiling in response to external stimuli – we can speak to her encouragingly and she will often smile in response. And she really does have a lovely smile (photos coming soon!). She’s also finally figured out how to get her fist to her mouth and has begun grabbing our fingers and trying to stuff them into her mouth sometimes, as well.

Last week, Elle got a Fisher price bouncer chair which she absolutely adores. When she’s in it, she’s propped up and able to see around (as opposed to her basket, which only allows her to see upward), and when we turn on the vibration mode, she’ll sometimes even be lulled to sleep. What’s more exciting though is that it’s actively stimulating her hand-eye co-ordination; shortly after we got it, we realized that she would look at one of the hanging toys (the elephant), and then intentionally grab or hit it, which is a new skill for her.

This past weekend we had a 5 hour power outage, so to amuse ourselves, Brock made Elle a fantastic high contrast mobile that we have hung above our bed, which Elle finds fascinating, particularly when we spin it around.

If all that wasn’t enough, Elle also made her first trip to our local pub, this week. Our friends Star and Pooch are visiting from the US, and the four of us had a lovely pub lunch on Tuesday.

Little infants have a relatively limited capacity of visual perception. They focus at short distances (sensibly, at about the distance from their eyes to mom’s at breastfeeding level) and have a predilection for high contrasts. We have a plush toy for Eleanor that is a sort of bee creature that has wings made from material with black and white patterns – polka dots and horizontal bars, that sort of thing – and she’ll stare at it for a good while.

Hunting for more high contrast patterns, I recently came across some videos of high-contrast animations made for infants. (google “infant visual stimulation”). We put one of these on the iPad video player, and she was pretty quickly engaged.

The only thing that bothers me is whether it’s a good idea to plug her into the video boob so soon…even if it’s only for a few minutes or so!

Taking a bath is still the MOST FUN EVER!!

This week, Brock’s rendition of Goldfinger is up against Barbara’s version of There was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly for song of the week.

Elle currently weighs in at 9 pounds – that’s a healthy kilo she’s put on since she was born just a month ago! Pretty soon she’ll weigh as much as Mr Cat!

Elle is growing so long so fast that we can no longer fit her into most newborn sized outfits, and have begun dressing her in 0-3 month sized clothes. (Thanks to everyone who has sent/given us clothing – it’s amazing how fast she’s growing!)

One of the challenges we’ve experienced began in the second week, when Barbara’s breasts became too engorged for Elle to feed on, and so she stopped feeding. To keep her fed, Barbara expressed milk and we bottle-fed it to Elle for a couple of days. Unfortunately, this creates habits that are not conducive to breast feeding. Finally we were able to connect with a midwife/lactation consultant provided by the NHS who put us through a rigorous program of retraining both Elle and Barbara to breast feed properly – this included a full week of Barbara expressing milk, and Brock “finger-feeding” it to Elle. This therapy was effective but exhausting, since it meant that both of us were up every three hours or so to express or feed. We’re glad to report that we’ve been back to breast-feeding for six days now – still with a few hitches, but we are definitely on the right track. Throughout it all, Elle has been great – eating well and growing fast.

She started smiling in the last few days, which has been really nice. She must be having fun. Some highlights of the last few weeks include: Elle’s first bath, which she really enjoyed, and sitting up on Barbara’s knees while hiccuping along with Billy Joel. To date, Elle likes: bright colours, her mother’s singing, baths, and sleeping on daddy’s chest.

Here are some more photos from the night when Eleanor came into our lives, and a few shots from the next day. One of the special (and unusual) things about our delivery was that Eleanor was given to me to hold right after she was born – allowing Barbara time to pause from the ordeal. I got to hold her on my bare chest, as we had planned. What an amazing experience!

There are also photos of the room where most of the labor was done and where we recovered afterwards – we all had to recover! Luckily, there was a pull-out sofa and a pretty nice view as well. Not that we looked at it that much. We were pretty focused on each other. And our brains were mushy from the physical and emotional intensity of the experience, and the lack of sleep. Barbara’s labor started on Sunday morning and lasted through Monday until Eleanor’s birth at 8:49 in the evening. We stayed in hospital until Tuesday evening before going home.

At the moment, we are still in the birth centre waiting to be discharged. More details (and some pictures of the incredible view of Big Ben from our room) after we recover. Thanks to everyone for you kind wishes and your support!