Surprise! Introducing Etta Emily

Etta Emily arrived two and a half weeks ahead of schedule on Friday, March 8 at 5:32 a.m., weighing in at 7 lbs., 15 oz. and stretching 20 3/4 inches long. She is Elise's newborn identical twin.

Arriving with more than two weeks until her due date, a lot of things were left undone around here. Elise's Jenny Lind bed. The kitchen. My dad worked like crazy over the weekend to get our dishwasher and sink installed by the time we came home from the hospital. But none of that really seems to matter anymore.

She's only been alive five days, but I can't imagine life without her now. I feel completely lucky to be the mom to two such beautiful little girls.

I have a few posts scheduled for the coming weeks and plenty of projects to show you, but I hope you'll understand if things are a bit quieter around here for a while!

Elise has an announcement

I'm kind of in between projects at the moment without anything complete enough to show you today. But Elise has an announcement she wants to share:

!!!

The super secret project I've been working on

I wanted to show you this super secret project I've been working on.

Surprise! Baby #2! I'm 16 weeks and the ETA is late March 2013.

We are excited! And nervous and curious and worried... all the normal stuff. We are planning to find out the gender later this month, and maybe then it will start to seem real. Because so far, I've been feeling kind of... distracted? Maybe that's just the way it is after the first time.

After weeks of feeling icky and useless, I'm finally in the high-energy phase, and I'm taking full advantage! Is it too early for the nesting to have kicked in? I'm cleaning, organizing and DIYing with reckless abandon.

If everything stays on schedule, Elise will be one month shy of four years old when this baby is born. I never imagined us waiting this long between kids, but, despite being a sweetheart, Elise was the the opposite of an easy baby.

Neither she nor I slept through the night for her first 14 months. Despite a number of attempts to remedy the situation, she didn't sleep until she started walking and tiring herself out. It took a long, long time for the memory of that to wear off.

Cross your fingers for a good sleeper for me. (Especially because this one gave up her naps long ago.)