Big boy!

Eli, Maia and I just paid a visit to our favorite kids' store, The Little Seedling, and they happen to have a nice baby scale there. Just for curiosity's sake, I laid Eli down on the scale, and discovered that he was about 15.5 pounds! (That's with all his clothes and a diaper on ... so it's not precise.) Even with the extra weight of the stuff he was wearing, I figure that that puts him at around 15, and he's only six weeks old! OK, now I understand why my back is aching after a long day of holding him and carrying him around. For comparison's sake, Maia was 12 lbs. at her two-month appointment with her doctor.

He actually had his longest stretch of sleep yet last night, at about five straight hours. That was a gift, because Maia has a bit of a cold and had a challenging start to her night (she had a couple of nightmares and has a very stuffy nose), and so we appreciate Eli cooperating by giving us time to care for her without his fussing and yelling from the other room.

Unfortunately, Maia's cold means that we had to miss the first day of preschool today. I think that this was a minor disappointment, but not as much of a catastrophe as we were thinking it could be to her. This morning, upon her first sneeze, she informed Brian that "We sneeze when we're healthy, not just when we have colds." Well, despite this well-reasoned argument, the sneezing continued and we went out for a special family breakfast rather than going to school. We're all strenuously hoping that she'll be well enough to have her first day on Wednesday, at which point I'll surely post the obligatory "first day of school" photos. :) I'll try to hold back on the wistful pondering of the passage of time and the importance of this big "first"--what I will say is how excited we all are, and how much I think Maia will thrive in this new environment where she'll make (potentially) 18 new friends and learn from a wonderful teacher. We're eager to see how her analytical and verbal skills grow when she has a regular opportunity to interact with all of the new ideas and concepts and strengths that her classmates and teacher will bring into her world.