Wow,
It has been almost four (now five, it took me a month to finish writing this post) months since the last post. You could say that we were lost for a while. The past months have been full of huge changes and events in our family's life. Of course Elodie, our favorite first daughter, is growing and developing at an amazing rate. She has gone from turning over to pushing herself up, to crawling, and pulling up to standing.
She even likes to visit mom at work. Turns out she is very good at 100's (a super-mean ab exercise). The above picture is a morning when Bryn-Erinn, Molly (a friend of ours and Elodie's baby-sitter when Bryn-Erinn is at work) and Elodie spent some time at the studio in a very involved workout.
As Elodie grows and develops, so do our strategies to keep her safe and from breaking things. We have spent quite a bit of time putting "childproof" locks on the low cabinets and drawers. This has been a good move, because it didn't take too long before she decided that the living room floor and crawling under the piano weren't the only cool places to be in the house. She also has a penchant for finding electrical cords. We are trying to get rid of as many cords as possible, and we are tacking the rest to the walls. All the outlets have plastic covers over them, which Brett finds difficult because he can't get them out to use the outlets. Of course, our fear is that we will find her with her hair standing on edge, like the Bride of Frankenstein, with the slight smell of burnt hair permeating the room, and she would probably have a big smile on her face, as if she had done something good.
Bryn-Erinn has taken on the task of feeding Elodie solid foods. Not surprisingly, Elodie has some strong opinions about the types of foods she does and doesn't like. Some of the more tart foods have proven to be great photo opportunities.
Elodie's favorite culinary pastime is avocado squares as finger food. For the most part, she is a pretty good eater (likely due to Bryn-Erinn's great baby food cooking). However, despite what seems to be a thorough post-dining wipe down, there always seems to be a bit left her in nose and behind her ears. The best are the bright green avocado eyeboogers that somehow surface hours after her last solid meal.
Early in the summer, we had an adventure with the whole Gourley family. We met everyone at Grandma and Grandpa Gourley's house. From there we drove 6 hours with four infants under the age of nine months to Ashton, Idaho. Where we spent time in a huge cabin. The sleep, eating and other cycles were all thrown to the wind, but the grandparents enjoyed time with their family. After a week Brett returned to Minneapolis to continue his work, while Bryn-Erinn and Elodie spent some time with Gramsy
and Bryn-Erinn's grandparents (Elodie's great-grandparents) in Spokane.
Way back in June, the fellowship (sub-specialty) match took place. We found out that we matched into the Dartmouth Hematology and Oncology program. This fulfills a commonly held dream of Bryn-Erinn and Brett to live in New England. We know the grandparents wanted something closer to home, and we are ready to get back out west, but after so many years away, another three will fly by. Brett will be finishing his internal medicine residency this coming June, and Bryn-Erinn has already begun looking at rentals, DMV information and utility information. She has found that New England is remarkably fashioned and archaic in many ways (e.g. car registration has to be done at the county clerk only, and it is different for all of each of the 10 counties, and is apparently so complex, they don't even bother to post details online. Never mind the garbage removal system...more on that later). In spite of the difficulties that the move will present, we are still excited to see a new place and move on to the next and final step in Brett's training.
sleepless week (more for Bryn-Erinn than Brett by far), but we have seen great strides in he
r development. In the hospital Elodie had a moderate level of bilirubin, which made her quite sleepy. We got her out of the hospital by cold wiping wet rags over her when she went to the breast to get her to wake up to eat (the Pediatrician approved/suggested this baby water boarding). It took another day or so before she was eating at a rate, but now she mostly eats like a champ. We have also had pooh 
all over the baby, out the sides of the diaper, the changing station, and on the wall. I never knew that such a little girl could project so well. We did have to take her to get an ultra sound to check her sacral dimple to assure that there wasn't a fistula (a low grade form of spina bifida), which there wasn't. In the last few days she has been having more eyes open time, and we believe that she is starting to make more faces at us
. 
We took the nice sunny weather to take some one week pictures of our little peanut. We love her very much, which is a saving grace when mom is very tired.
