Pre-blog Elena email

December 1, 2014
Before (and for a bit after) I began the blog, I used to email my family and closest friends with Elena updates each month.  Could I have been any more excited to be sweet baby Elena's mom? :)  Now that I am finally printing the blog into a book, I wanted to include some of those.  Apparently many have been lost over time.  I guess that I used to actually clean out my email mailbox.  This is the first one that I could find.  I'll insert the other 3 into the next couple of months where appropriate.  I'm sad about the emails that I no longer have, but I know that Elena's baby journal and photo albums are VERY thorough.

August 4, 2007

Now that Elena is just two weeks away from being 7 months, I thought I'd better send this out.  We are all doing well.  Dan is in the middle of his ambulatory rotation and because he has now experienced internal medicine and hospice, he has learned that he doesn't want to do either one. :)  He is working hard and it is great to have him home in the evenings.  He is here to play with Elena before she goes to bed at 7.  I love seeing them play together and he makes her laugh so much. 

We've been invited to join the Spanish branch in our stake, so that'll be different.  The branch is small and Dan will be a great asset to them.  I think that they will keep us pretty busy.  I'll be working hard each Sunday to remember my Spanish.  Yikes!  We are going to try to keep going to activities in our original ward because we will miss it a lot. 

I had a blast at girl's camp last month and my mom and Dan kept Elena very happy.  I don't think that she even missed me.  I was able to have some great experiences with the girls in our ward and hopefully I made certification enjoyable for the first level girls that I was in charge of.  Yesterday I drove to Raleigh (about 80 minutes away) with a friend and her one year old to go to a mall there.  I didn't get anything, but we had a lot of fun and I loved looking around in the Pottery Barn Kids store.  Elena was great.  She took her morning nap on the way there and her midday nap on the way home.  I love that she has a schedule now.  I think that having no schedule was one of the hardest things about when she was a newborn.

Elena's update:
At her 6 month check-up we discovered that she weighs...a whopping 13 lbs!  :)  She's consistently between the 5th and 10th percentile.  She now has three teeth.  Her top right tooth came in yesterday.  Although I  can barely see it, I know that it is there because she rubs her bottom teeth on it and it makes a clicking sound. 
She sits up very well, but not well enough for me to trust her unless she's on the carpet because she does tend to reach for far-away toys and fall on her side. She likes to spin around in circles when she's on her belly to reach/see different things. 
She is learning how to pick up Cheerios, and it is hilarious because she hasn't yet mastered getting them from her hand to her mouth.  She is surprised whenever we feed her one because it isn't pureed like the rest of her food.  Being the paranoid first-time mom that I am, I break them in half before I give them to her. 
We have a new game.  She'll imitate our sounds and we can go back and forth "talking".  She'll copy:  mama, dada, clucking her tongue on the roof of her mouth, and happy screams/exclamations.

She's so great!  We are so grateful to be her parents.  I'm glad that we are able to update you once a month and that you (hopefully) don't mind hearing all the details of Elena's development because I love to tell you all about her.  :)  Enjoy your weekend!