Confessions of a busy mom

Thursday Emma Linh turned 9 months old. To celebrate she decided it was time to cut some teeth. This girl is my kind of girl now. She is cutting two at once. Why cut one when you can cut two? My fellow over achiever in the making.

I realize that this is a bad picture. You're going to have to click on it and make it bigger to actually see the fuzzy suggestion of two tiny teeth starting to poke through. But Emma is very private about her teeth. The paparazzi had to stake her out all day to get this photo and even then it was taken against her will. (I hear she might press charges.)

I confess, I have never taken a picture of my babies first teeth. But perhaps this will make up for all of the other injustices that I have perpetrated.

Trace was my first baby and my whole world revolved around that little butterball. Trace had not only a baby book (with practically every line filled out) but also a cute little wall calendar with stickers. Every day of at least the first six months of that calendar has something written on it. And let's not forget the professional photos taken every 3 months.

Ross had a baby book but not as filled out as Trace's. There was no calendar. Photos every 6 months.

Julia: baby book, forgotten after 3-4 months. Photos every 6 months.

Jenna: When we received Jenna in China she came with a kind of baby book. It didn't have all the little details you would like but we cherish the few photos that came with it. There was really no point in creating a baby book for a 16 month old once she came home. Photos, once a year until preschool and then twice a year school pictures.

Emma: Bless her heart, she is child #5. I shamefully admit she has no baby book. I also, even more shamefully, admit that she has yet to have a professional photo taken.

Unless I can count this one:

This is a photo of Emma's visa photo that was taken on Halloween day. We went to a professional photo studio in Hanoi and had this taken. Emma had to sit up for the photo but she had NO muscle tone. Emy and I are propping her up in the back and in the front underneath her shirt. Both of her ears had to show in the photo. It took several tries to get this.

Poor baby wasn't feeling well anyway. We left the photo studio and walked to the SOS clinic where she was diagnosed with bronchiolitis, the beginning of our RSV adventure. But there's a story for another day.

So maybe the photo of her teeth was an attempt to make up for my other inadequacies. I like to think that this blog is a sort of baby book. Its way to record the lives of my children and what's going on in our lives and maybe months of years from now we'll actually look back and see what we were doing.