Baby Charlee

We drove down to Eldo the weekend after baby Charlee was born so we could meet our new niece and Alex could meet his first cousin. And we met her, and she is just the tiniest, most beautiful little thing ever. See for yourself.

As most people with a two-year-old do when holding a newborn baby, I thought, "I can't believe Alex was ever this small". Then I realized that Alex never was that small!

Speaking of Alex...he loves babies as a general rule, so that, combined with the fact that for weeks we had been talking up our visit to "see Baby Charlee", Alex was pretty psyched to meet his tiny cousin. He wanted to feel her face and touch her eyes and pet her hair - all in a sweet, loving way. Given his track record, I was a little worried he'd have a Lenny moment and smoosh her little head between his big ol' paws, but we managed to keep his need to squeeze under control.

Man, those two are gonna have a ball someday. He really was super sweet with her and wanted so badly to pick her up by the head and carry her around the house. We told him she'd have to be at least a month old before we'd let him do that.

That last pic cracks me up every time. The look on Alex's face when Charlee starts to fuss is priceless. We're trying to prepare him for the fact that babies cry all the time because, despite his brutish nature, he is super sensitive and gets really upset when other people cry. At school, he will hug kids who are crying (nevermind that he probably punched them first), and if I cry (I'm pregnant, hormonal, exhausted, and have a two-year-old that drives me to insanity from time to time - it's gonna happen), he LOSES IT. It's about the most pitiful thing I have ever seen in my entire life, and of course seeing him upset like that only makes me cry more, which in turn makes him cry more, until eventually we are both rocking and blubbering like two rocking, blubbering crybabies. Anyway, I digress. Point is, Alex is in for a lot more tears, so he better learn to suck it up, like a.s.a.p.

Oh, and you may remember (not that one could forget) the "Team Alex" shirts that adorned the mob of family members waiting at the hospital for Alex to be born, and now here Cousin Alex is, wearing his very own "Team Charlee" shirt (while Wii-ing, of course).

When he wasn't wearing his Team Charlee shirt, he was cooking eggs in his underwear.

And let me leave you with this lovely picture of Baby Charlee and her Mommy and Daddy, who are doing great adapting to their new little one. They don't look one bit sleep-deprived, do they?