Ella Four months and one week..

Wow! How time flies... After a bit of well meant guilt from grandma Ville and I finally have managed to update Ella's blog!  We added about 10 posts of pictures, so do scroll on down through!

Crazy to think that Ella is already 16 weeks old and 14 lbs 8oz! She is "leveling" well as Ville calls it :)  Soon she will probably roll over,  she chatters often, loves sticking things in her month and is constantly staring at the world around here.  To my great relief she just had her last jabs before the 12 month ones.  No more tortured mom having to hold down her legs!

I started work part time at an incredible company (really the only reason why I started!). We now have  one of the MBA class partners watching Ella 2 days a week and Ville watches her one morning.  Next semester that will be cut to Ville 1 1/2 days and our babysitter 1 day. Nice time for dad and the baby!  On wednesdays Ella and I go to our swimming class with the other gals from our antenatal class.  It's a lot of fun! The babies seem to enjoy it overall - smiling and giggling all the time.

On fridays we have a day off together but our time has been so crazy and busy in Oxford that "day off" just makes me laugh :)

Overall Ella is a really mellow baby. She likes to sit contentedly in my lap when we are out and loves to smile.  Even in the morning if she wakes up before mom and dad she just giggles at her mobile and plucks at her stuffed animals.  So cute!

And last but not least, mom's favorite picture of the month:

-Liz

---

Ville also wrote a little blurb for the blog, so here ya go:

Ella’s now almost 4 months, and I haven’t written since she was born. Very bad of me.

First thing that strikes me is that how strangely boring the process is. You hear about how children learn things so very fast, but quite frankly that’s just in proportion to what they know previously. I’m not saying this as a bad thing per say, but it’s just somewhat surprising – and quite amusing – watching the attempts at rolling around go on for a month or so. The total lack of restraint results in comedy gold as Ella’s roars remind me of javelin throwers at the Olympics. There was one semi-success a couple days ago as she somehow managed to flop around while I was changing her.

I mean obviously she has learned several things, the most important of which, from a parent’s perspective, is smiling. It’s just downright cool seeing her eyes light up and a huge smile come on her face when she sees you. It’ll take her a while to learn proper human cynicism I guess, but it’s quite a treat while it lasts. The curious side effect is that even this grumpy finn has started smiling a lot more – it’s very hard not to when smiling at her is practically guaranteed to make her happy… who’d have the heart not to?

Of course nothing is perfect, and babies have their associated chores. Fortunately we have a pretty decent arrangement with her sleeping now, and Liz has constantly been an angel about the nightly activities. While I can sleep relatively little, I am certainly a deep sleeper, and waking me up for a short period results me in practically (really) walking in to walls. I appreciate her taking pity on me and handling the nights. The daily chores generally speaking aren’t that bad, especially as she hasn’t had literally explosive diarrhea for a long time.

I also kind of suddenly realized that the baby is growing at a quite rapid rate. This can be primarily noticed when carrying her – she used to be light, but 7kg really gets to you after a while no matter how light it sounds. The most curious thing that came to mind regarding this is that she won’t be as easy to cuddle with later. Yes, that’s right, cuddle. It’s quite interesting how adorable it is when your daughter… burrows… in to you when she’s sad. One of those really primitive and incredibly strong emotions overcomes you.

All in all, I wouldn’t change it for the world, even though it can be rather frustrating when she decides to have a problem right in the middle of something interesting. Oh well, nothing good comes for free.

-Ville