Yesterday my baby turned one. Let me tell you all about Elizabeth.

Only a few days after Carissa was born I started to feel a desire to have another baby. Usually that’s the last thing you’d think about after giving birth, so I set the thought aside. Yet many times as my two kids grew up I’d look at them, and at our family, and feel like one was missing. Once I learned I was expecting in 2012 those feelings and thoughts disappeared.

Pregnancy challenges me. When I was seven months pregnant I received a new calling at church that was hard and felt overwhelming at first. I prayed that in exchange for my service, I would have help with my pregnancy and delivery of the baby. Wesley and Carissa’s births were very difficult in different ways.

I was due around mid-November but labor started around 11 pm on November 5th. It was Monday night and I was just getting ready for bed. I had stayed up too late watching a movie with John, and I felt so tired. Nonetheless, labor was happening. Around 1:30 or 2 am my visiting teacher came and slept on the couch while John and I went to the hospital. I had my first-ever epidural. Though the newness made me nervous, it was overall a wonderful, wonderful experience because for the first time I had a baby without the pain of labor. Wow.

When the doctor showed up I felt nervous again, remembering how difficult pushing had been in the past, but the doctor acted like it was no big deal, and it turns out it wasn’t. The water hadn’t broken yet, which may have made her birth easier and my recovery faster.

She was born around 6:30 am on Tuesday, November 6th, 2012 (Election Day). As soon as I held her and got a good look, the first thing I thought was how different she looked from Carissa when she was a baby. This baby was lighter, more fair, and with less hair. We named her the next day: Elizabeth Erin.

I enjoyed the quiet time I had with her at the hospital, and I thought she was very sweet. When we brought her home she was so quiet that sometimes we’d touch her chest to make sure she was breathing.

My mom and dad stayed with us a short while to help, and my mom spent much time holding baby Elizabeth in the rocking chair at night (she’s a softie like that). One morning she told me she felt like her mom and grandma (Elizabeth’s great- and great-great-grandmas) had come for a visit.

Elizabeth was very small until I started feeding her formula around her fourth month. Since then I think she’s become the biggest baby I’ve had. She seems to be growing up fast. She loves sippy cups. She is really good at imitating. If you make a sound with your mouth (such as blowing air or growling) she’ll imitate it. She also is quite vocal. Sometimes John and I joke about what it’ll be like having two chatty girls around. I feel like, for her age, she is good at communicating vocally. She is my only child who hasn’t used sign language. I use it sometimes with her, but for all her imitating, she’s just not interested in sign.

We’re getting more familiar with her personality as she gets older. Some words I’d use to describe her are playful, social, and explorer.

She seems to have a sense of humor and is very playful. She loves to play peek-a-boo by ducking behind a doorway and then popping back out, or holding a blanket over her head and pulling it off again. Now that she’s walking she thinks it’s great fun to walk away from you, even as you call her name, with a great big smile on her face.

She’s still sweet, but more spunky now. She seems to really enjoy being with other people. She’s aware of who’s in the room and whether she’s alone. She’s learning to play independently, though.

She started walking at 11 months, and now that she’s mobile she is quite the fearless explorer. She is quite good at going up and down stairs (she scoots down so fast that it’s like she’s sliding on ice). She clearly wants to be able to walk up and down stairs like the big people do, but she’s still too small. With her being so good on the stairs sometimes I’ll find her in unexpected parts of the house by herself. Just this morning I found her in a darkened bathroom with her hands in the toilet.

As far as sleeping goes, when she was younger she used to go to bed at night without so much as crying, but later she started to cry at bedtime and wake up after she had been sleeping through. After a few months I got up the courage to let her cry and now we know she can cry herself back to sleep with no problem. She goes to sleep around 6:30 or so and I don’t get her until after 7 am (my personal sanity-saving rule). She’s usually happy when she wakes up, and she likes to hang onto her blanket when I pull her out of the crib to go downstairs. She takes a morning nap and sometimes an afternoon nap.

She has about four teeth on top, two on the bottom, and her first molar coming in as well. Her hair is a beautiful auburn color, kind of golden/red/brown, and quite straight. She’s getting more of it, too. I think she is a beautiful little girl. We are glad to have her in our family.