Introducing Ruth Miriam!!!!

Well, this post is very overdue! Baby Ruth, however, was not - born a week early, weighing in at a teensy (for our kids) 6lbs 9 oz. She came into the world quietly and intensely alert, casting a surprised and bewildered look around her, a look that she has not yet lost. She spends her very few times of wakefulness each day looking around her with a, "Where in the world am I? How did I get here?" kind of curiosity.

We've been home a little over a week now, and although we haven't really settled into a routine yet (mostly due to the pain-killer stupor I've been in) everyone is doing great. Not to sound too Pollyanna, but the girls are all very excited about the new baby, and are handling the off-kilter routine really well. Lucy is nuts about Ruth, insisting on giving her sloppy/slimy kisses every few minutes and taking on "diaper duty" (bringing new ones and throwing the old ones away) with gusto. Woe to anyone who has the audacity to change a diaper without her assistance!

It is weird for us to have such a tiny baby this time around. Ruth was born a week before her due-date, which puts her five weeks earlier than Abbie and three weeks earlier than almost everyone else. We've realized that we aren't actually used to newborns, since most of our other babies were so overdue, born with clear eyes and chubby, chubby legs and a fluidity of movement that Ruth can't quite muster yet. She is so small, and moves her head and arms in such a herky-jerky way that it is sometimes hard to believe she is real. She looks more like an animatronic baby than a real one. To boot, she has this habit of holding her hands up to her face and with the mittens she wears to protect her skin from her tiny nails, she looks exactly like Henrietta Pussycat from Mr. Rogers - small and adorable and cuddly and vulnerable. We all can't help but dissolve into puddles at her feet.



Ruth has not been around for a full two weeks yet, but somehow it is already impossible to imagine life, or our family, without her. This is one of the miraculous things about having babies that I will never get over - that instantaneous, gut-wrenching love that binds you to this tiny stranger, this minature, barely responsive person who somehow causes you to feel the most intense kind of protectiveness just by the way she opens her mouth, trusting that someone will love her enough to place some kind of food in there.

I'll be posting more pictures and videos over the next few days, but I don't think I can be blamed if I choose, instead, to spend my free time looking down at the even breathing of this new, amazing little baby who has come to help us become, as a family, who we were meant to be.


*By the way - yes, that blue curtain in the first picture is hiding the fact that my guts were at that moment still splayed all over the table. Isn't that a weird thought?