Halloween fun...even though it is not quite Halloween yet, we have already had some Halloween fun. We went to a trunk or treat at our old church, and Ellery wore her outfit, a gift from some friends in Kentucky. Elan was an airplane. I got a few pictures of Ellery, though she is not photogenic yet! One picture looks like she is smiling, but it was just one of those moments. The last picture was taken a few days before, and she actually had her eyes pretty open. She is 3 weeks old today!

Ellery's one week check up was this past Monday, October 13th. The doctor thought she was doing great. Her weight was 6 lbs 12 oz, and all they really expect is for babies to get back to birth weight by the age of one week (which she surpassed by 7 ounces). The doctor thought her neck muscles were strong, and everything else looked good. We go back in about three weeks.
Here are some more pictures of visitors after her birth. Dee and Pop came to the house as well as Noni and Lito. The middle picture is her asleep in her cradle. She seems to like having her arms out of the blanket instead of swaddled. Sometimes she puts her hands beside her head, but not quite behind her head like her brother did.

Ellery has arrived!

Ellery is here! Our daughter was born at 12:32 PM on Monday, October 6th. She weighed 6 lbs 5.2 oz (I left the decimal in there because Elan weighed almost exactly the same weight at 6 lbs 5.6 oz). She was 18 1/2 in long. Funny too that Elan was born at 36 weeks on the dot, and she was born at 36 weeks and 5 days. Evidently my body did almost the identical thing, but this girl let us sleep a little more and did not come in the middle of the night.
The name is Ellery Burklyn. In case you are wondering, we chose Ellery because we wanted to keep with the trees theme since Anthony is an arborist and Elan's name means tree in Hebrew. Ellery has to do with one who lives by the elder/alder tree. Evidently it is supposed to be a boy's name pronounced A-LAY-REE, but we like it pronounced Ellery as a girl. Then for the middle name we wanted to use something related to my name. Didn't want Kirsten so we focused on Burcham. The root of Burcham is Birch which is the same root as Burke. Anthony liked just Burke, but I thought we should add something feminine to it, so we made it up to be Burklyn. Then we realized we had chosen initals of EAM for our first child, and EBM for the second child, and I guess we will at least do the middle name of a C if we have a third. Maybe we can find another E name that we like too. Anthony's dad had siblings with middle names that all rhymed (8 children in all), and he liked that. We thought the A,B, C thing might suit us.
Perhaps more details than you care to have, but there it is! We are doing fine. Just got home yesterday, and so far she has been eating better than Elan did. He is a happy big brother, but not overly interested in the baby.
The pictures below show her at birth with daddy, mommy, and Dr Bradshaw. Then there are a couple pictures with the whole happy family and her with her eyes open.