It’s been six weeks today since Anna was born. She’s still so tiny, and yet at the same time, so much bigger already, I can’t believe how the time is flying by. This also means my maternity leave is halfway over, but I don’t want to think about that. We have finally seen some nice summer weather here in Seattle (though I haven’t complained too much about the cooler temps we’ve had, given what the rest of the country had to contend with). We’ve taken advantage of the sun with lots of trips to our neighborhood parks–Max differentiates these by the color of their slides, so we have “Blue Slide Park” and “Yellow Slide Park.” Anna is giving us good smiles and has done a few nights in a row of a nice long stretch of sleep, for which I am very grateful.

Max is still hit and miss at nap time these days. When I put him down today I came downstairs and turned on the monitor to hear him saying: “I get out of my bed right now right now RIGHT NOW!” When that didn’t work, he tried, “Mama, open my door, please” and finally an appropriate quote from one of his Pigeon books: “I’ve changed my mind!”

We’re looking forward to the arrival of Grandpa and Grandma Helen this weekend and Oma and Opa later this month. Max talks about our far away relatives often and enjoys talking with them via Skype camera calls on the laptop. Of course there is no substitute for an in-person visit, we definitely wish everyone lived closer!

A few pictures from our week…

Anna and I spend a lot of time in the green glider, nursing and snuggling. Here she is in a milk coma:

This one shows the beautiful mother’s necklace I just got for my birthday. It has Anna and Maxwell’s names and birthstones, and the bottom disc has the line “I carry your heart” from the e.e. cummings poem, which was one of our wedding readings. I love it.

The other night we were fixing dinner and Max’s pants were wet. I took them off and before I got a chance to get him dry ones, he had started playing with our kitchen utensils. The sight of him on the kitchen floor, wearing just a diaper and his pajama shirt, whisking away, was just too cute.

I mentioned in last week’s entry that some good friends of ours recently had a baby girl, Penelope. When Angel and I were both pregnant, we independently each picked out the same hat from my friend Leanne’s Tiny Toppers shop, so naturally we had to get pictures of the girls together. Penelope is a month younger than Anna but weighed in at 10 pounds, 10 ounces at birth, so they aren’t too far off in size!

Yesterday I had to stop mid-diaper change to get photos of her cuteness. I just can’t help it, she’s too precious.