Every now and then, it's time to look at the then and now

Has it really been over 1 month since my last posting?! Could this be the longest I've neglected the blog? Thank goodness I don't make a living from blogging -- I'd have lost my entire readership by now (or maybe I have anyway!). Yeah, phew, thank goodness I don't make money writing about how cute and funny my child is, geez how awful that would be...

So, what does a writer do when she's short on time and creative energy (that being totally sapped by work)? I'll do what TV writers do -- have a clip show! A retrospective.

I've noticed some funny parallels in the pictures I've taken in the 21 months since Evelyn was born, and now's a good a time as any to do the compare and contrast...

In the photo on the left, Evelyn was just 3 days old! She was 8lbs, 5oz at birth and never really looked like a wrinkly newborn. You can see the yellow tinge of her skin, and if you could zoom in, you'd see the yellow in the whites of her eyes -- her jaundice had moved in and gotten comfortable, and we would remain prisoners of it and the hospital for another 3 days. My recollection is that we took this picture in the middle of the night - all was quiet on the hospital floor except the humming of Evelyn's incubator in our room and our own strung out nerves.



The picture on the right is in a nearly identical room in the same hospital where we had Evelyn - St. Luke's -- 3.5 months later. This was in Paula and Rhea's recovery room the day after Rhea was born. Evelyn was a whopping 18 or 19lbs. See how much more relaxed John looks? (though I think it was still all a facade at that point...) It was super hot in the room, so Evelyn was just in her diaper, and only after did I notice these mirror images.

Ah... swim class. In the picture on the left, Evelyn was 14 months old and it was the first day of swim class at the Janet Pomeroy Center. She gazed in wonder at what that giant blue area might be. The picture on the right was taken about 2 weeks ago, at 21 months, on Evelyn's first day at La Petite Baleen -- a swim school for babies, toddlers and young kids that exceeded my wildest expectations and hopes for a swim class.

Words cannot describe how excited I was on the first day of class as they went through 30 minutes full of activities that were not only fun and well-organized but that would really help develop skills in the water. Having no fear of water is such a gift and luckily, Evelyn probably won't ever realize it!