She hasn't smiled yet, but damn she seems close.

This past week, we've made some great progress regarding Eleanor's sleeping patterns. She still wakes up 2 or 3 times each night (pretty normal for a 1 month old baby), but she almost always goes right back to sleep after feeding. So even though we're waking up a lot, we now get 6 to 8 hours of sleep almost every night. She's also taking more daytime naps now, whereas before, it seemed like she never slept in the afternoon, she just fussed. Lots of progress in the Rhodes house, and Elle is getting more beautiful each day.

My daughter is an absolute spectacle.

This is maybe my favorite picture of Eleanor. Maybe. I decided I'd post a few more pictures, since some of you want to see them, but don't have the time to wade through a million pictures on Nikki's smugmug site.

Here she is, live and in color!

Sorry that it has been so long since I last posted anything, but as you can imagine, things have been busy. Eleanor is doing great, and we're having so much fun learning about her little personality. She starting to sleep a little more, but most nights are still pretty exhausting.

Here's a video we shot this morning when she was very alert. We really enjoy these moments when she wants to be awake, and seems much more responsive to us. For those who watched the entire video and didn't understand my reference to the "dramatic chipmunk," here's that clip. Just keeping you informed.

This is my life...

Can you believe this? Seriously.

For those of you who haven't heard, Eleanor came into our lives at 10:23 PM on Sunday, Dec 2. She weighed 6 lb 14 oz, and measured at 19 3/4 in. Her beauty is absolutely unspeakable. Nikki and I are pretty overwhelmed at this point. Overwhelmed with joy, exhaustion, laughter, stress, sleeplessness, gratitude, wonder, humility, questions, love for our daughter, and love from our friends and family.

Nikki's recovery from the c-section is going great. We went to get the staples out of the incision on Friday morning, and the doctor said that Nikki is moving around so well that he would have thought her c-section was 2 or 3 weeks ago if he didn't know her. Breastfeeding is also coming along really well. After a few miserable and stressfull attempts in the hospital, things are finally coming along well. Nikki's milk came in on Wednesday night, and our little Eleanor is finally getting enough fluids (for awhile, we thought she'd have to go on an IV drip of fluids due to dehydration, but we're out of that mess now that she's feeding so much better).

Thanks to all of you precious friends who want to talk to us, but have kept yourselves from calling every day. I know it has been hard for some of you, and Nikki will begin calling all of her beloved friends soon, I promise. For now, she has enough to stress about without me asking her to return phone calls from friends. We'll keep trying to post updates on this blog, and we're also going to be posting more pictures on Nikki's smugmug photo site, at http://www.nikki-rhodes.smugmug.com/ We've already posted a few photos to that site, so I'm not going to post many here. Check out that link to see more of our precious little bean. (We started calling her bean after seeing her swaddled up so tight in her blanket.)

Our mammaries overfloweth. (actually, Nikki's mammaries overfloweth. No flow is occuring with my mammaries)

Question: Is my daughter here yet? Answer: No. No, she is not.

So unfortunately, Eleanor is not here yet. We went to the doctor last Wednesday, and he said that he'd be surprised if we made it to next Wednesday without having the baby. So that's good news, but Nikki is till miserably uncomfortable.

Our wonderful friend Erin made us these wooden letters for Eleanor's wall that Nikki and I are in love with. Especially Nikki. The letters are from some website where you can submit any font and size you like, and they cut letters for you. I think you can order them painted different colors, but Erin got them blank and painted all these designs on them herself. Can you believe this? Seriously, this is a literal question: can you believe this? You should have seen Nikki when the letters arrived. She hasn't been that excited since we found out we were pregnant. They are easily Nikki's favorite thing in the room. Occassionally, she'll randomly get up to go into the room, and say to me, "I think I'm going to go look at the letters" in this squeaky, giggly I'm-a-fifth-grader-who-just-met-Jordon-from-the-new-kids-on-the-block voice. Last week, we were driving home from a bed & breakfast weekend in Salado, and as we drove home Sunday morning, she said, "I can't wait to see the letters." They are that good. Pictures attached, but the pictures don't do them justice. If you live within 250 miles of Waco, come see them. On second thought, maybe you should wait till Eleanor comes so you can see her too.