Developmental milestones for the first month

In the week preceding Joy's 1-month birthday (which was Friday, for anyone keeping track), she has achieved three important developmental abilities:

1. she has started to lift her head on her own. I would have posted pictures for this, but Kimberly beat me to the punch two posts down.
   
2. two nights this week, she slept for six hours straight! Each time, I woke up in the morning, and asked what time Joy had eaten in the night, and Kimberly said that she had slept most of the night. Hurray! (Now, we just need to get her to go to sleep earlier than 1-2 am.)
3. Joy has started to follow things with her eyes. I first noticed this when I was holding her, and as I moved my head, she would rotate her head so that she could look at me. At one point, she even turned a full 180 degrees as I moved from one side of her to the other. Since that time, she has become a bit less content to just sit in one place: she wants someone to walk around with her, so that she can see what there is to see!

Finally, just in case anyone was wondering whether Joy's dad is quirky or not, and for anyone who doesn't know how hard it is to resist imitating a baby who's making funny faces, see the following picture:

Joy's Wake-up Routine

When Joy gets up from a nap, she likes to spice up her stretching routine by doing impressions:

Football Ref - "Touchdown!"
Rosie the Riveter

Hulk Hogan

News Flash!! Baby Lifts Her Head!!

Lately we've read a lot about the importance of "tummy time." The theory is that since it is safest for babies to sleep on their backs, they should spend lots of awake time on their tummies so they can practise lifting their heads in preparation for crawling, etc. Determined to be good parents, we dutifully placed our infant tummy-down on her Boppy* pillow Wednesday night, expecting her to lift her head a hair's breadth every ten minutes or so. Lo and behold . . .
. . . Joy promptly raised herself several inches off the pillow and held that pose for a long time (two or three minutes, which is practically an eternity for a baby). From her parents' reaction, you'd have thought she was patting her head and rubbing her stomach at the same time. We were effusive in our praise, and excessive in our photography (if you want to see the other twenty shots we took, feel free to contact us).

Apparently the effort wore her out, though, because when Phillip put Joy on her tummy again the next evening . . .

. . . she immediately fell asleep. Probably gathering her strength for the next attempt.

*No Boppies were harmed in the making of these pictures.

Joy's blessing

Joy received her baby blessing* from her dad in church this past Sunday. We were touched that so many family members, friends, and even Kimberly's boss Crosby joined us for this special event.

*In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, children aren't baptized until they're old enough to make the choice for themselves. However, when they are newborns someone with priesthood authority offers a prayer over them in church, promising whatever blessings he feels inspired to state.

Lessons of Parenthood

As the days go by, Joy is constantly teaching us things about parenthood that you just don't find in those What to Expect books. For example:

Lesson #1: Don't try to use your baby as an alarm clock

Based on Joy's typical feeding schedule, Kimberly assumed our daughter would wake us up in plenty of time for everyone to eat, get dressed, and head off to church right on time last Sunday. Alas, little Joy was loath to leave baby dreamland . . .

. . . so she (and, consequentally, her exhausted parents) didn't wake up until fifteen minutes after the meeting started. Fortunately, a Spanish singles congregation meets in our building at 1:00pm. While we were there, another new dad we know came in and sat behind us. His young alarm clock was malfunctioning, too--it kept going off every hour the night before, so when the usual time for church rolled around, he and mom were just too worn out.

Lesson #2: Baby facial expressions are a hoot

Sure, the experts and all our relatives insist that every expression a newborn makes is "just gas," but that doesn't keep us from grinning and cooing every time the corners of Joy's mouth turn up. It is also hard to resist the temptation to add dialogue to her little expressions, like:

"Yikes! The poltegeist is back!"

or

''Man, these pacifier things are so overrated."

Lesson #3: Baby feet are really cute

OK, I already knew this fact before I became a parent, but my interaction with Joy continually reinforces it.

Here come the aunts and uncles!

Here are the pictures of Joy's new aunts and uncles that we promised.

Everyone is more energetic around Emily, and Joy is no exception!

Except when she's asleep...

She snuggles contentedly with Laura.

Andrew visits Joy for a few minutes while down from BYU.

From the very beginning, Robbie has showed us that he's going to love being an uncle!

Heather told us before Joy came that she was going to spoil her silly. We're trying to prevent that, but it doesn't change the fact that she's excited about her new niece.

Except when she's asleep.

I know - these aren't aunts and uncles, but when I saw the picture, I just had to include it in the bunch!

That's all, folks!

How to get copies of pictures

Ok,

Since I'm an engineering student, and most engineers like to make things as quick and efficient as possible, I'm changing the way that you all can get any image files that you want. In this post, at the very end of the post, I said that you'd have to go to our family website if you wanted the full image files, since Blogger scales the image size down.

However, that's a lot of work for both you and for us. You've got to remember the URL of a site in addition to this one (and who likes to remember the address of lots of websites?), and I end up having to upload multiple copies of the same images, which takes a long time and is tedious.

So, from now on, so that I only have to upload one image, and so you only have to come to one site, I/we will post images in such a way that clicking the image in the blog will give you the full file, if you want it.

And again, maybe I'm making this a bigger deal than it is, but I'll be glad to not have to do so much work.

Happy Holidays from the Hendricksons!

I just ate, and Daddy's holding me, so I'm happy!