From zero to one

Here is zero

Here is one




Well it all happened very fast and now before we could catch up, Maetia turned one!! A brief summary: She is a beautiful little girl with so much personality and spunk. She is a little elvish and we think she will be sneaky at times and try our patience. She also seems very clever (all parents think this of their children we know) and she already has a love of music. She is wiggly and wiry with her little bum still in the first size cloth diapers. She can clap and wave, shake her head and scream (sometimes all at once). Her sounds are: baba, bye, bubu, mama, mmmm, dada, dudu, dodo, dogga, gaga, gigi, kitty, tees, hoss, hi, and hya. She loves all animals and will point out animals in every picture, painting or sign. She points at everything and when she gets really excited she falls over from pointing so vigorously. She eats almost all food both purees and finger foods and we did decide to give her meat in the end although we debated. She does not have any dairy products and minimal soy. She seems to do better without them. She has always been a skinny little thing and the doctors have done multiple tests to see why she is so under weight. They have not found anything wrong with her and we feel that she is just a little person, not unlike some of those little Footes and Contants in her ancestry.
As a couple, we went from living with my sister and her children for a summer (2004)and thinking we knew quite a bit about parenting, to having a baby of our own and realizing we didn't know that much after all. To be honest, Maetia's colic and breathing difficulty put a strain on the enjoyment of the first few months. It was hard on our marriage, hard on our bodies and minds. Once she began to settle, we started to meet this little girl whose belly didn't seem to want to let her relax, and we fell even more in love with her than we already were. Most of our pictures of the first three months she is sleeping because otherwise she was often crying or moving. We also spent a lot of time with her upsidown with our finger in her mouth. When she learned to sit up and was able to sleep on her own for more than 20 minutes at a time, we all felt better. She smiled at 3 weeks, laughed at 7 weeks, ate cereal at 4 months, drank from the sippy cup at 5 months, sat up at 7 months, scooted around at 9 months and can almost walk unassisted at 12 months. Maetia spent (and still does spend),a great deal of time in her sling and we walk everyday loving the fresh air and wind in our hair.
This has been a journey of learning. We have learned how to be parents, learned how to share each other, and learned how to live life outside the womb. As with all journeys we learn as we go and we get a little wiser the more we experience. We expect the next few children will not have to experience quite as much trial and error and for that we will apologize to Maetia in the future. On the other hand, she is the only one who will get our undivided attention, all of her siblings will have to share us with her, and she had us all to herself. But just so you know, there are no siblings brewing.
We tried to make a slide show but with dial-up internet and not being very internet savy we didn't do such a great job. So we have pictures on the Kodak photo page: www.ofoto.com You can sign in with our account which is: contant_love@artlover.com and password is maetiaalese. The album is called Maetia's first year. We hope this works for you. If not we can try again on something like Flickr.
Thanks for loving us as a family and for sharing in our joys and struggles. We feel like we have been given the most precious gift we could ever get and we hope and pray that we will do a good job caring for her.