Ellie is such a wonderful addition to our family and we are so thrilled to have her! The first six weeks went by in a sleepless haze, as all parents will probably remember of those newborn days. She is often awake and very alert, looking around with such curiosity, but she will usually give us a good 3-4 hour stretch of sleep in the first part of the night so that’s great. The rest of the time there is not much rhyme or reason to whether she will be sleeping or not. I remind myself regularly that this is temporary, but I’m too tired to remember, so if you talk to me, feel free to tell me that I will sleep again someday.

Our girl is a great eater, which comes as no surprise to anyone who has seen James eat. Like brother, like sister. She wasn’t giving me much of a reprieve from breastfeeding, wanting to nurse almost constantly, so we have introduced supplemental formula. While I definitely have some mom guilt about it, it’s been the right thing for us and I’m focusing on the fact that she is still nursing and getting breastmilk even if it’s not exclusively.

As I’ve previously shared on this blog, my dear friend Stacy Paul is an amazing photographer and when she came over to meet Ellie, she took some beautiful pictures of her for us. Check out the full set of pictures here and enjoy a couple of them below.

I also wanted to try my hand at taking some staged newborn pictures of my gorgeous girl and including James in them as well. Our wonderful friend, Kim, gifted us a fantastic shirt for James proclaiming him “Ellie’s Big Brother” and a corresponding onesie for Ellie marking her as “James’ Little Sister” which I couldn’t wait to take pictures of them wearing. We were also lucky enough to get a visit from Kerri (that I’ll share in more detail in a future post) and she has quite the knack for staging the pictures, so we make a pretty great photography team.