Alice, For Starters

Me, two days before Alice made her entrance into the world. I look at this now, and can't believe I was nine months along. The two boys made me puff up like the marshmallow man. I'll always be grateful to her for being smaller than her brothers.
Here she is in the hospital. Yes, she is dressed in boy clothes. I mentioned the ultrasound guy told us she ways a boy, right? Michael's grandpa likes to tease us that his Harvard education is tarnished by the fact that the tech at the Harvard teaching hospital can't even properly read an ultrasound.
She was surprising to us in so many ways. First, she was two weeks early, and the gender thing, but also the hair, and the fact that she was merely 7 and a half pounds (Seth was a good solid 9). Plus, the entire labor only lasted about two hours. It is a good thing that she came in the middle of the night, otherwise she easily could have been delivered in that famous Boston traffic.

Michael says he's never seen me so happy in my life as when my OB announced "It's a girl!" What can I say? My favorite color is pink.

Here is Seth holding her for the first time. He eventually made peace with the fact that she was not a brother. You can tell that he was not being cared for by his mother at the time because his face was filthy. Not that I don't ever let my kids have filthy faces, I just usually don't take their pictures when they do.
The picture from her birth announcement. She finally got something feminine to wear when my incredible mother-in-law showed up with a baby shower in a suitcase. By the time my mom made it with another suitcase-full a week later the house had completely been taken over by pink.
Her blessing day at the Arlington Ward in Boston. Awesome Ellen took these photographs for us.
See Alice's bouffant? She had the best baby hair. Once somebody came up to me and said that they had to check to make sure it was a baby, because the hair made them think I was carrying a monkey around in the Baby Bjorn. What a thing to say to a new mom. They are lucky I didn't burst into tears right there on Boylston Ave.

I love this picture. Isn't it the sweetest?
In case you can't tell, we like her. We'll keep her.