Hadley Elizabeth Schmidt

Clearly lots has happened since my last post, thus making it a "little" busy for a post. I'll try to catch up in the next week or two, but no promises. :)

Our Hadley, Hadley Elizabeth, decided to grant her mommy's wishes and come early and naturally into this world on the morning of Saturday, December 10th, 2011. Clearly most if not all of you already know this, but I'm going to work on putting as much as I can remember here b/c I don't want to forget anything about Hadley's birth. It's almost weird to say this but I enjoyed her birth. I'll do a birth post, but for now I'd like to focus on right now back to our time coming home.

Hadley is 5 days old today and it's been such a blessing to add her to our family. She is a much better nurser than Morgan was at this point even though some of it I will chalk up to my experience and knowledge of nursing with Morgan. We still have to relatch sometimes and I'm still sore but it's a temporary thing and I'm very confident that Hadley and I are going to get along well in this area.

Adam is Hadley's baby whisperer. She is not a fussy baby thus far by any means but she still has moments as we would expect. Adam, however, can calm her within 5 minutes (at least after our first night home...that was a special sort of hellish time) and have her back in bed ready to go. Ok ok, that was one night last night (which was amazing - she was the best baby ever).

Morgan loves her sister. So very much (reference picture post to be coming soon). She enjoys playing with her, gently touching her face/head/hand/anything, really. Morgan's the diaper duty queen, by the way. She loves playing under the jungle gym mat with Hadley and takes the best sister pictures with her. When she's not sure where Hadley is (sleeping, for example), she scrunches her face up and asks where her baby sister is. One of our favorites - she can't quite say "Hadley" but it sounds a bit like "Howdie" with a tiny /l/ sound in there somewhere. It's adorable.

And lastly, I cannot say enough about my little Hadley. She's simply beautiful and I'm starting to see teeny bits of "infant Morgan" in her. She doesn't look like Adam's twin infant but I'm not sure I see a ton of me in her either. I love how alert she is when she's awake. I love how she turns towards Adam's voice when he comes home from work or hasn't talked to her in a while b/c he's busy with Morgan and the like. Hadley amazes me/us already with how well she holds up her head and looks around to see what's going on before resting back on our chests and snuggles in. Oh, my Hadley...

To all of you who told me it would happen, it's true. Having a second child does not mean my heart had to split or make room for another person and take away some love from someone else. My heart has grown and easily accommodated her into our family.

For now that's enough b/c it's time for a "last chance feeding" before we go through another night that looks/acts/feels just like last night. I had to wake her for each feeding (doctor says every 4 hours max) and she then slept until 8:25am after a normal bedtime. Note - I realize this was likely a fluke but a mommy can hope, right?

I'll work on the birth story in the next few days. As I said earlier, it was one of the best things I've been through in my whole life. Clearly the birth of a child will have a person feeling that way usually, but, well, I'll go into it later. A tiny person is going to be so excited for me to wake her up...so her mommy and daddy can go to sleep and stay that way a majority of the night unlike our first night home...

We're so glad you're in our family, Hadley. It's right where you're supposed to be.