My beautiful baby daughter is finally here!

It’s awesome being a mother, and Daniel is a really great dad. We’re so happy that Allelia is now a part of our lives. I’ve got a few moments of quiet while she’s napping, so I’d like to share my birth story!

I went into labor around midnight on January 30. At first I thought it was either Braxton Hicks contractions, or maybe even indigestion! I tried to sleep through it, but the contractions kept coming about every 5 minutes and would wake me up, so I was sleeping in itty-bitty stretches of 3-4 minutes. By 3:00am I thought it was probably the real thing, so I called my doula Michelle. She said to just keep trying to rest and to check in with her in a few hours as labor continued to progress.

By 5:30am I decided that the labor was sufficiently “real” to call my sister and let her know that she should probably start getting ready to drive up here with my mom instead of going in to work. At that point I was starting to have trouble carrying on a conversation, so I asked her to call my mom for me.

The contractions got stronger, but I was able to deal with them pretty well using the pain management techniques I learned from the book Birthing From Within.   I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to have an unmedicated, natural-as-possible childbirth!! My friend Kristin loaned me her copy and she deserves a prize for recommending it to me!

I spent the next few hours dozing and getting some much-needed sleep, but by about 8:00am the contractions were waking me up too much. I ate crackers and apple juice for breakfast, very slowly because I was starting to feel sick to my stomach. Daniel called Michelle to check in with her, while I hopped in the shower and listened to (don’t laugh) Justin Bieber’s “Baby” slowed down 800% and other slowed-down tracks, which helped distract and relax me through the contractions.

Daniel, meanwhile, had been discreetly timing my contractions, which were coming about every 3-4 minutes and lasting for about 45 seconds. He stayed with me through just about every contraction, getting me juice and water and ice chips and comforting me when I needed it.

Once I was out of the shower, I started to have more trouble dealing with the pain on my own. Daniel called Michelle again and told her we were ready for her to come over. She arrived around 11:00am (times after this point are kind of fuzzy since I wasn’t watching the clock) and immediately helped put some extra pressure on my knees to counter the pain of the contraction. I have no idea why it works, but it was amazing how much easier this made getting through each contractions.

Michelle timed my contractions over the next 30 minutes or so. Once they got to about 3 minutes apart and over 60 seconds, she suggested I eat something with lots of carbs for energy, and then we could head to the hospital. Daniel ran across the street and got some fresh sourdough from the bakery for me. Later I found out he also got a sandwich for himself, too!

The trip downstairs, to the hospital, and into Labor and Delivery was a little slow, since I stopped every 2-3 minutes for a contraction. They admitted me around 12:30pm. At that time I was 7cm dilated and almost fully effaced. I labored for another hour or so in the hospital bed and then in the shower, and Michelle and Daniel were right there with the knee pressure and gentle shoulder massage.

At that point I started feeling the urge to push, so the nurse came in to check me. I think her name was Emily, but I may have remembered it wrong because I was so out of it by that time. I kind of just shut my eyes when I started feeling like I needed to push and all my focus shifted inward, so it was really hard to tell what was going on around me. She made sure that I was fully dilated to 10cm, and then gave me the ok to push. She and Michelle helped me learn how to start pushing, because I was putting more power into my lungs than I was into pushing out the baby!

As I was pushing, my water finally broke. It’s as a lot of people described it – a big gush. You don’t just think your water broke: when it breaks, you definitely know it did!

I pushed for a while, and it was pretty exhausting. It’s a lot of work getting the baby’s head through the pelvis. Emily and Michelle guided me through this part, until Lelly had gotten into position and they were ready to call my doctor, Dr. Raj.

At this point I think it was around 2:30pm. Dr. Raj had to leave at 3:00pm but I’d gotten so far they went ahead and called her instead of the on-call doctor, Dr. Weber. However, I didn’t push the baby out in time, and Dr. Raj had to go, so Olga, a midwife at the practice, came in and attended while we waited for Dr. Weber. At 3:00pm there was also a shift change, so I got a whole new group of nurses and a midwifery intern as well as a different birth attendant!

This was the time that it hurt a LOT. I mean, the contractions hurt, but when the baby’s head started crowning, that was way more painful. Here’s where having Daniel and Michelle there helped – there wasn’t much they could do physically other than hold my hand or stroke my hair, but emotionally they gave me the extra edge I needed to get through that last hour. Also, I reminded myself that soon the pain would be a memory and that the baby would be here! Those were the only things getting me through it.

When I finally got Lelly’s head out, the rest of her came really fast, and they plopped her onto my belly. She was born at 3:34 in the afternoon, after about 15 hours of labor, and about 7 hours of active labor, which is pretty great for a first baby. Daniel tells me that Olga actually “caught” the baby, and that Dr. Weber arrived shortly thereafter. Lelly cried a little bit, but mostly she just looked at me and I looked at her and talked to her, and she was so pretty! It was really amazing how quickly I was able to snap out of that extreme focus of giving birth, to open my eyes and immediately connect with my little baby girl.

A lot happened after that, like Daniel cutting the cord and the nurses collecting the cord blood for donation, but I was too busy looking at Lelly! My mom and Erin arrived about an hour after Lelly was born, and Matt and David maybe an hour after them. There were lots of photos, Lelly got a bath, and they moved me from my room in labor and delivery to a mother-baby unit.

We stayed that night and the following night. We were discharged from the hospital on February 1, Bryan’s 30th birthday. We’d originally planned to go out and get Korean BBQ to celebrate – I fully expected to be at least a week late! But instead Bryan and Tania came over for a bit, held Lelly, and we chatted for a bit while she slept. A much quieter time, but there was a lot to celebrate and be happy for!

I was so happy that I got to have pretty much exactly the birth I wanted. I had a spontaneous labor, and spent as much time as possible at home before heading to the hospital. I had no pain medication or medical interventions, and my water broke on its own. I was aided by doula and attended by a midwife, and Daniel was right there with me the whole time. I feel so fortunate to have had the expertise of nurses who’d worked with midwives a lot and were really comfortable with natural childbirth, and who read my birth plan, respected all my wishes, and never once offered me an epidural or other pain relief. I’m proud that I had a (relatively) short, textbook labor and delivery and glad that I had enough faith in my body to be able to say, “I’m strong, and even though it will hurt, I can do it.” And I did!

Erin and Mom were a huge help in the days after we came home from the hospital, but they left yesterday morning. My aunt Lyn and uncle Walt stopped by for a brief visit yesterday afternoon, and Daniel’s mom will be coming up next weekend, but for now, it’s just the three of us, getting the hang of being a family. I think we’re pretty awesome at it!

I will admit, I have much less free time than I used to, and most of it is currently being spent recuperating from giving birth, making food, feeding and changing Lelly, and trying to catch up on lost sleep! I originally thought I’d make the birth announcement and write this post from the hospital after I’d gotten settled into the mother-baby unit. Ha! I was so tired and out of it, anything beyond taking care of Lelly (including mindless movie-watching) was totally beyond me.

Now that I’m home, I’m a lot more clear-headed, but check this out: before the baby, this birth announcement/blog post would have taken me an afternoon. Now, it took me three days, and I’m surprised that I’ve been able to write so much this afternoon all in one go. I’ve managed to sneak in a quick bite of lunch, too, but Lelly is now awake and demanding sustenance, so I don’t get to proofread this.

The hard part is actually finding the tea once people pick what they want, and I’ve meant to rearrange everything for a while, but never got around to it. It was high time I did, though: look at this disorganized mess!

Many of my teas come in cardboard boxes, as you can see, and I had a ton of little boxes where I had a few tea bags left – not enough to justify saving an entire box. As I organized my teas, I saw how all the boxes were just about the same size and thought, why not attach them together to make them easier to store?

So here’s a simple project that will take under an hour with materials you probably already have around the house. You could do this with other small boxes, like those tiny, shallow jewelry boxes, and organize them in clever ways to make trays for office supplies, buttons, beads, or other little crafty treasures.

I think at this point I’m nesting or something, waiting for this baby to come, because doing this project was very satisfying.

Materials

• 3-5 small cardboard boxes all the same height and length
• tape
• scissors
• contact paper – OR – kraft paper/wrapping paper/grocery bag plus glue stick

Directions

If your boxes have extraneous flaps, cut them off.

Line up your boxes in the order you want them in – you can see the one on the left is a little wider to accommodate some of the wider bags.

Use your tape in long strips to attach the tops of the boxes together.

They should be neatly joined by their tops when you’re done.

Now flip the whole thing over and tape up the cracks between boxes on the bottom.

Tape up both sides as well. Now your caddy should feel sturdy. It’s functionally complete, but not very pretty. Let’s decorate it!

I had contact paper lying around the house, complete with a convenient grid on the back which helped me position the box on the paper and trace around it, and then extend the sides to cover all the surfaces. If you use kraft paper or wrapping paper, a long quilting ruler or other see-through ruler will help you make nice, neat edges. Add a “seam allowance” of about 1/4″ to 3/8″ on all sides. You’ll need to make a little clip in each inside corner so that it will wrap neatly around the edges of the box. (See later photos for a better illustration of this)

Cut out your cover. Basically it looks like an exploded box with no top! If you’re using contact paper, carefully peel off the backing and lay it down sticky-side up. Otherwise cover the wrong side of your cover with glue.

Carefully line up the caddy in the middle of the cover and press to make a good, strong contact. Now you can see how the sides will fold up around the caddy.

Starting with the narrow ends, fold up the cover and press firmly. You can see that the cover extends about 3/8″ on either side and the top, and that I’ve notched the sides to make it look nice. Wrap these around the edges and top of the box. Repeat with the other end.

Now fold up the front and back sides of the cover and press firmly. I waited until the cover was in position before notching at the seams between boxes, so that they would line up perfectly. Press each of these little tabs down into the box.

Here you can see all the little tabs pressed down, for a nice, neat finish. You’re done!

Here’s another view of the finished caddy.

Fill with tea! Look how much better my tea collection looks already.

Here’s my caddy in the cupboard above the sink where I keep my tea. Look how nice it is, and how easy it will be to pull it down and hand it to a guest for them to peruse their tea options!

Have fun!

(BTW, my awesome new DSLR came yesterday so all these pictures were taken with that! I had such a blast making this tutorial.)

My KitchenAid stand mixer, a gift from my dad several years ago, has proven very useful on many occasions, and pregnancy-induced laziness is indeed a great reason to use it more than ever! I used it to mix the gingerbread for the turtles, to make two batches of focaccia for Christmas and New Year’s Eve dinners, and most recently, for a batch of scones.

Normally I mix scones, biscuits, etc. by hand, kneading just until the ingredients come together and erring on the side of under-kneading and lumpiness. I didn’t want to get in and mix the dough with my hands the other day, though, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the dough hook mixed my scone dough thoroughly without a very noticeable difference in the texture after they were baked.

The recipe for the scones is the same as the Orange Scones I posted a while back, with just a few simple modifications to the ingredients. All the instructions and baking directions remain the same.

• Instead of an orange, use the juice and zest of a lemon.
• The lemon will yield significantly less juice than the approximately 1/2 cup of juice the orange does, so add enough water or nondairy milk to the lemon juice to make 1/2 cup. (This is in addition to the 1/4 cup the recipe calls for – you should have a total of 3/4 cup water/milk/lemon juice, and 1/2 cup of oil in your wet ingredients.)
• Add in 1/2 teaspoon lemon extract if you have it to boost the lemon flavor.
• Add 1 tablespoon poppy seeds.

If you use a mixer, simply put all the dry ingredients in the work bowl and stir well to combine (the whisk attachment was good for this), then add the wet ingredients all at once and mix on a medium speed with the dough hook until the dough comes together and no flour is left. You may need to scrape down the sides once or twice to make sure everything gets incorporated. Then proceed with the cutting and baking!

Somehow Daniel and I managed to exercise restraint and eat the scones over the course of three breakfasts, rather than gobbling them all down on the day I baked them. A great pairing for the scones is Earl Grey tea or a gentle citrus-infused tea blend. I had Earl Grey rooibos tea, and it was delicious! (I have the Rishi Tea variety at home, but I’m sure any other brands would be equally interesting.)

Warm up your winter morning with some delicious scones!

Side note about creative projects

I have several projects in progress that I’m really excited to share when they’re done – a quilt,  two blankets, and a sweater for Lelly and a hooded scarf for me. Plus I started writing up a pattern for a really cute little striped monster toy that I knitted for Lelly, which will be posted in the store when it’s done.

The last trimester of pregnancy has been pretty tiring overall, but particularly in the last few weeks I’ve been noticing a marked decline in my energy for knitting, crocheting, and sewing (or anything else, really, besides simple household tasks, easy cooking, and blogging!) I’m hoping that once Lelly is born and my hands feel more normal, that maybe I can take one afternoon a week or something, let Daniel or one of her myriad real/adopted aunts and uncles take care of her, and keep going on my projects. Other moms that are reading this, please don’t laugh at me for my optimism!

I hope until I get into a good routine with this baby that everyone will be content with pictures of other projects that I’ve been meaning to post for ages, any new-mom-friendly recipes I come up with, and of course, tons of pictures of Lelly. I’ll be getting a DSLR soon (it was the one thing I asked for this Christmas!) and I’m looking forward to having even nicer photos in my blog in the near future!

Our previous years’ creations:

• 2003: A classic house. It was just Daniel and me putting it together and we had NO idea what we were doing, so the house was gigantic, the gingerbread extremely thick, and it wound up being a huge chore to eat up! It was our first Christmas together: we started dating a few months beforehand and Daniel came to visit me right after Christmas for a few days before heading back up to UCSB.
• 2004-2005: Sadly, we did not make gingerbreads during these two years.
• 2006: A dinosaur. This guy was pretty cool, though the gingerbread was a little clove-heavy.
• 2007: Pirate shipwreck, complete with Teddy Graham carnage, and a treasure trove of gummy root beer bottles, Gushers, and Nerds. This was the first year that our friends and family got involved in the decorating, and they’ve been excited to participate each year since. Picture in the gallery below.
• 2008: Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster Gingerbread Man: A huge gingerbread man, appropriately assembled in pieces because it was so large it wouldn’t fit all on one cookie sheet.
• 2009: Gingerbread of Amontillado: One of my favorites. A stop-motion animation we created as we helped the Montresor gingerbread man assemble gingerbread bricks into a wall that immured the poor Fortunato gingerbread man.
• 2010: Meta-Gingerbread: We made a gingerbread oven with a jolly-rancher glass viewing window that had tiny gingerbread men inside. Look out, one’s trying to escape! Picture in the gallery below.

Which brings us to 2011 (which, due to my laziness, is “last year” already, even though it was only two weeks ago). We made gingerbread turtles!

The recipe we used was the very tasty Gingerbread Cut-Out Cookies from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I have learned to roll out this and all the other gingerbread doughs much thinner than I think I need to (like a heavy 1/8″), in order for the pieces not to bake up so horribly thick that they’re a chore to eat.

We draped circles of dough over six small Pyrex ramekins and two Corelle cereal bowls, forming the excess dough into protrusions that could be later formed into heads, legs, tails, etc. Pro tip: in addition to greasing the bowls, we should have first covered them in foil, since the dough stuck fast and we couldn’t remove the gingerbread from the bowls.

Despite this one setback, decorating the turtles was tons of fun. Bryan and Tania joined us one day to decorate some tiny turtles, and then Daniel and Donna did round 2 on Christmas day. Please enjoy these photos of the finished turtles!

Happily, the measurements today show that Lelly’s growth is average and my doctor estimates that she’ll be about a 7-pounder. Both my sister and I were over 9 pounds, though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if she winds up being a little bigger.

Most of what’s making me look big is apparently the amniotic fluid surrounding the baby. For the record, I am not about to give birth any day now! I have about seven weeks to go, though with Christmas in less than two weeks I think the time will fly by!

Please enjoy this picture of my baby! (I love how she has that scrunched-up newborn look to her face even though she isn’t even born yet.)

For those of you who need a little extra help interpreting the photo, here you go. I’m not offended that you can’t figure it out, ultrasounds are tricky!

Despite the fact that I’ve relaxed my diet a bit during pregnancy and I’m now much more omnivorous, all my baking is still vegan. I don’t like eggs and I don’t drink milk, so why have them in the house just for baking? It’s too much trouble!! So this Thanksgiving, I wanted an excellent pumpkin pie that didn’t require me to buy either of these things.

There are a lot of vegan pumpkin pie recipes out there, but I can’t bring myself to make any recipes that call for a big ol’ brick of tofu or other ingredients which affect the texture and the taste of the pie. Why can’t there be a pie that tastes good, has the right mouth-feel, contains only ingredients you can get at your local grocery store, and doesn’t have tofu, dairy, or eggs?

Well, there can be! I made it!!

This recipe has been in development for the past few weeks. I tried several iterations of spice blends and methods of thickening the pie until I got it just right. Today was a calculated risk, using my family as guinea pigs to test the final iteration, but it totally paid off – I made the perfect pie today!

It’s a bit time-intensive, but if you roast and puree the pumpkin a day or two beforehand, then all you need to do is prepare the crust and toss together the filling. Don’t be daunted! It’s great! The pie came out of the oven at about 11:30am, and I just let it cool on the counter all day, and served it at about 6:30pm, after we all stuffed ourselves with a downright tasty Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll admit, the dinner menu was largely dictated by my pregnancy cravings, but nobody seemed to mind.

Is this not a beautiful pie? See the big butternut squash in the background – that was the size of the one I roasted up for this pie. All the veggies in this centerpiece were grown in Donna’s garden. Yum! Okay, let’s make a pie!

First, prepare the pumpkin

Get yourself a little sugar pie pumpkin. They are small, only about 8 inches in diameter. If you get a big jack-o-lantern pumpkin, not only will you have more pumpkin than you know what to do with, the pumpkin flesh itself will not be very flavorful. (More about flavor and the quality of your squash later.)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Split the pumpkin in half, scoop out the seeds and stringy bits, and place both halves cut-side down on a baking sheet. Roast for about 1 to 1.5 hours, or until tender.

Let the pumpkin cool until you can handle it comfortably. Scrape all the pumpkin flesh from the skin. Puree in food processor. Line a colander with cheesecloth and allow pumpkin to drain for several hours to remove excess moisture. Then measure out pumpkin as needed for recipe.

One pumpkin will make enough puree for two pies, so make a double batch of filling, or store the puree in the fridge for up to 5 days, or freeze it for later.

Here’s my tricky little secret

You can also use butternut squash instead of pumpkin! I was disappointed with the flavor and quality of the pumpkin I’d purchased at the store – it was much more watery and bland than I was expecting from a pie pumpkin. My mother-in-law had a big harvest of butternut squashes this year, and I thought, “Why not use them?” The homegrown, organic squash tasted so much better.

To cook a butternut squash, proceed as for the pumpkin, splitting and scooping out the seeds, but place cut side up in a 13×9 baking dish with about 1″ of water in it before baking at 350 degrees for 1 to 1.5 hours. Puree as for the pumpkin, but you can skip the draining step since butternut squashes are much drier. Depending on how big your squash is, you can get anywhere from 1 to 3 pies from your squash!

Make the pies!

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Crust

Make a half recipe of the canola oil piecrust found in the Peach and Dried Cherry Tartlet post.

Roll out crust until it is 1/8 inch thick, and place into a 9 inch pie plate. (An 8 inch pie plate will work also but you will have extra dough – use it to make leaves or other fun piecrust shapes to decorate the top of the pie when you serve it.)

Filling

• ¾ cup organic cane sugar (you can also use plain granulated sugar without much difference in flavor)
• ½ cup cornstarch
• 3 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 2 teaspoons ground ginger
• ½ teaspoon ground allspice
• ½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• ¼ teaspoon ground cloves
• 2 ½ cups pumpkin (or butternut squash), prepared as above
• 14oz can coconut milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Combine sugar, cornstarch, and spices together in a small bowl. Place pumpkin into a large bowl and stir in the sugar mixture, blending thoroughly to avoid any lumps of cornstarch. Add in coconut milk and vanilla, and mix well to combine.

Pour filling into prepared crust. If you use a 9 inch pie plate all the filling should fit. If you use an 8 inch pie plate, you may have extra filling, and if you do, pour into small 4-oz ramekins to bake alongside the pie.

Bake at 375 degrees for 60-65 minutes or until the crust is golden and the center is slightly jiggly but not liquid. (If you have ramekins, bake them for about 30-35 minutes.)

Let cool at least 3 hours before cutting, to allow the pie to firm up.

A final note

I realize that this pie is not gluten-free, nor is it corn-free for those with allergies to either of those foods.

If you bake the filling in ramekins, without bothering with the crust, that is gluten-free and very tasty (as my mother-in-law can attest). You can also make a gluten-free pie crust; I’m just partial to my classic canola oil crust that I’ve been using for pies my entire life.

I began the recipe development using arrowroot starch instead of cornstarch to thicken the pie, hoping to make a corn-free pie as well. However, arrowroot starch breaks down and loses its thickening power the longer it is heated, so that pie wound up having a texture similar to a thick applesauce. I do not recommend substituting arrowroot starch for the cornstarch in this recipe, but I would definitely be interested to hear if anyone makes it with yet another starch, maybe tapioca, and lets me know how that works.

First, I set up a dev environment on my local machine using MAMP and then installed the latest version of WordPress. I used the WordPress export tool to create a backup of my live site, and then I imported that backup on my local machine’s WordPress install so that it would be as close as possible to the real site.

From other projects that I’ve worked on in collaboration with Daniel, I’ve learned that using Sass is awesome. I set up Compass for my project both so I could use Sass, and also so I could use clever mixins to make less work for me!

Once the theme looked good on my local machine, deploying the theme turned out to be challenging for two reasons. First, I got PHP errors that didn’t make sense. (Admittedly, most PHP errors don’t make sense to me because I’m not, in fact, into that sort of thing.) All of  them were complaining about syntax errors on line 1 of the files, on the server all of the code was on one line. Turns out that because I used some simple PHP files for my theme that I did not write, just downloaded, that the end of line format was different on my Mac than it was on the server. *sigh* An article on the Vim wiki was helpful in fixing that.

Second, when deploying a new theme, I figured out that I needed to add my sidebar widgets over again. I got this blank space where the sidebar was supposed to be and thought, “Aw, man, what else is wrong with the PHP files? Or is it my CSS?” Then I looked at the sidebar div and it was completely empty, and then I figured out adding the themes again was the answer.Obviously it’s been a while since I’ve changed themes.

So hooray, I’ve fixed the issues and I’m happy with how everything looks now. I think there are a few outstanding formatting issues in old posts and pages, but not enough to stop me from using my new theme. I figure, if they’re problematic for me or someone else, I’ll fix them if that time comes.

One of my pet peeves when blogs launch a new redesign is that the old design goes away, so there’s nothing for comparison for new readers to see what the changes were. And I’m really proud of these changes! So here are before and after screenshots so even if I redesign this thing many times in the future, this post will still make sense.

Before

After!

I can still do it, but the baby bump in the way is getting bigger all the time, and I have to sit down, rather than just bending over and tying them like I used to before I got pregnant.

So I started browsing Zappos to find a nice pair of slip-on shoes, and noticed that the Simple brand had a “flat elastic” version of several styles of their shoes. This looks exactly like they threaded white 1/4″ elastic through the holes.

I realized I had several yards of white 1/4″ elastic in my craft room.

So I pulled the laces out of my blue Converse shoes, and estimated that I’d need about 21″ of elastic (unstretched) per shoe. I wrapped one end in tape to make it easier to thread through the grommets. The other end I tied in a large overhand knot to keep it from pulling through the grommets. Then I laced my shoe like this:

I slipped the shoe on, and tugged on the elastic to tighten it comfortably around my foot, and then tied the taped end into an overhand knot.

Both shoes now laced with elastic, I just slip them on and go!

I’m most happy that I didn’t have to buy another pair of shoes, just used elastic I already had around the house. If you plan to do this yourself, estimate at the fabric store how much you might need by holding it up to your shoes in the lacing pattern, and then give yourself a few extra inches to play with. Or just play it safe and get a yard and a half, which should be enough for many types of shoes.

We went in for a very detailed ultrasound this week, and the technician measured her little head and abdomen and arms and legs, as well as checked out all her organs and body parts and whatnot, all of which are normal and developing at a good rate.

At our first ultrasound to confirm the pregnancy at 8 weeks, she was only about 18mm long, less than an inch, and looked pretty blobular, though definite arms, legs, and a head were visible if one knew where to look. It was amazing to see how much she had grown in just 10 short weeks!

The doctor provided me with a stat sheet telling me all her measurements, which I totally wanted but did not expect them to give me without me having to ask. I love that kind of stuff!! Please share my enjoyment as I list her little statistics:

• Biparietal Diameter (BPD): 4.11cm. This is how big across her skull is.
• Head Circumference (HC): 15.47cm.
• Femur Length (FL): 2.64cm. Her tiny little femur is only about an inch long!!
• Humerus Length (HL): 2.47cm.
• Abdominal Circumference (AC): 12.78cm. Her head is bigger around than her body is.
• +1 water magic (This one came from Daniel, not from the ultrasound technician)

Using the BPD, HC, AC, and FL measurements, they took these and put them into a formula to estimate her weight at 254 grams, or about 8oz.

Now please enjoy these pictures!

Viewing the baby in profile, you can see her little nose, lips, and chin!

Here she is on her side, facing down. You can see her little spine and her legs curled up underneath her.

It was so neat to see inside her body! Here the hemispheres of the brain are clearly visible, along with the eye sockets, nose, jaw, and chin!

I have such an awesome baby and I can’t wait to meet her!