less cute photos

Sophia finally lost that little stump of the umbilical cord she was trailing around. The hospital clamped her cord around an inch from her belly and she wore that clamp while she was in the hospital - a big yellow inch-and-a-half-long potato chip bag clip that the nurses used a big pair of white plastic plier-type things to remove. Kind of traumatic at the time - the nurses descending on our 3-day-old daughter with what looked like a dentist's extraction tool.

The clamp, and the resulting hunk of drying skin and blood, had made it a little hard to dress and change Sophia, since (as we said before) the diapers we had for her were too big. Update: we have purchased some newborn diapers and all is well, just in time for her to lose the cord stub and allow us to put size-1 diapers on her. So she has graduated, in a sense, from her parents giving her plumbers butt with the big diapers too low, to her parents giving her grandfather pants, with her diapers up around her armpits. We can't really win.

It's a graduation in another sense - she's a week old, and we have settled into a nice routine. Tricia's parents are still here and David's parents have arrived, so there's plenty of folks in the house, but we can still retreat to the nursery to feed and have some quiet time. With the loss of her cord stub she doesn't look quite like a hospital child anymore - more like a little version of different parts of us. We are still in disagreement about who she looks like, and who's nose and eyes she has, but I am convinced that she has my Grandfather's chin and neck. Either that, or Grandpa's neck looked like a baby neck. Who can tell...