The Ledsworths

I think it’s a pretty common thing to adopt voices and create play time norms when trying to entertain your child. I have found that in these past few weeks (since Zoe received some awesome toys for Christmas) that we have pretty much developed a whole show, complete with diverse characters and voices. This plays well to my absolute joy in singing - thank goodness Zoe doesn’t seem to mind how dreadful I am at it - and being goofy. It’s also helping me with my rusty Spanish, as I use this time to only speak to her in Spanish.

I expected to eventually screw Zoe up in some way or another—I was just hopeful it wouldn't have been so early on.

Something that I've found pretty helpful in maintaining my sanity through this (and most of life) is providing silly narratives to unfortunate events we find ourselves in. We've had a couple terrible nights (cluster feeding, waterfall vomit from overeating, poop...everywhere–you get the idea) and I noticed we had her in the same jammies both times.

Greetings, all! I write this at 3:14 am while baby Zo sways gently in her swing (life-saver of a device) and listens to nursery music on repeat. I feel like there are going to be many moments of, “welcome to the parent club,” and this one feels like one of those.

We’re transitioning as well as sleep-deprived new parents can! We’re extremely fortunate that she is an amazing eater (and was since birth), and she’s calm except for when you change her diaper or try to put her on her back. We’re also very lucky to have my folks here to help us get used to all this newness, help us get some sleep, and generally keep the wheels on the bus (ah, lame mom humor. It begins. Though I’d venture to guess that Steve would say it had started many many years ago).

We’ve received many-a-note saying that people love the name we’ve chosen for baby, to which I say: Thank you! We love it too!

Zoe Eloise. How’d we land there? The short story is that I found both names while scouring lists of baby names, and we narrowed it down to this combination.

Update October 26th @ 2:30PM:

I've tried to write about 10 updates between the last–which was somehow almost 24 hours ago–and now, but was sidetracked every time. I'm currently stealing a bit of the already fairly non-existent sleep time I have to get this one out (you know, that time you have after feeding, changing diaper, swaddling (I'm real slow), signing whatever the heck Bob from registration needs, getting the side eye from Nancy for still not getting around to filling out the birth certificate paperwork, and so on until you get to repeat the process again in 2 hours).

Despite this whole thing being ridiculously challenging everyone is healthy and we couldn't be more excited to welcome Zoe Eloise Ledsworth into this world. She was born October 25th at 7:27PM; weighing 6 pounds, 8.6 ounces; length of 19.5 inches. She is perfect.

Welcome, everyone, to our family website! As the caption mentions, we thought this would be easier than sending a holiday card. And in truth - it required a lot more hours of (Steve’s) work than a holiday card would have taken, but I’m pretty sure that this will work out better in the long run.