Clara Penelope Bliven was born September 3rd, 2023 at 7:43am. She's perfectly healthy and came out only one day overdue at 7 pounds, 2 ounces. Elena and Maya just love her. Maya is very excited to be a big sister and a big girl in general.
This baby is just the cherry on top of a great summer that went by in a flash.
Here are a bunch of photos from our fun filled summer. I was extra trigger happy with the camera this summer. This gallery has nearly 200 pictures so please excuse the long loading times. I'm still just hosting this website from an old netbook in my house.
Knowing the baby was due in September we were really feeling the heat to get Maya potty trained. Maya switched to big girl underwear and we've had a wonderful diaper free summer with very few accidents. Even though Maya had no school over the summer she certainly kept busy. She did ballet, tumbling, a few day camps, and a nature exploration program. We had a Children's museum membership for really hot days. Of course went to lots of storytimes at the library and many adventures at Dodge Nature Center. We continued our springtime spree of going to at least one playground nearly every day. Maya got a bike with training wheels and loves to go way too fast. She has been very interested in Amelia's pregnancy and was immediately ready to be a big sister. Since being potty trained she's spent the summer being obsessed with the fact that she's a big girl now and is eager to do everything under the sun. She played birthday a lot this summer and was so happy when it was finally her real birthday. She also really enjoyed celebrating her mom's birthday a couple weeks later. It was a fun summer with a lot of variety but soon she'll be back to ECFE and preschool camp 3 days a week.
Evalyn spent a lot of the summer with us again. Amelia signed Elena and Evalyn up for at least a million programs. Most of my days consisted of carting the girls around town at the beck and call of our calendar. Evalyn and Elena were in various tennis and basketball camps nearly every day. They had cooking class, CPR training, canoe camp, book club, multisport mania camp, and volleyball camp. Elena also started piano lessons with a new instructor and took advatnage of some drop in Orchestra classes at her school. She spent a lot of time with friends too.
Amelia is eligible for paid maternity leave. She thought taking care of a newborn without also working would be too boring so she decided to start an online Masters in Nursing program at WGU. She's been working full time and getting ahead in school.
I started playing Pokemon Emerald this summer. Going for my third living pokedex, wish me luck! I also had a pretty succesful garden again this year. I think I finally have this gardening stuff down. My dad and I went on another Ballpark Tours trip this year, it was tons of fun and really deserves its own blog post.
Even with all the craziness we managed to pack in quite a bit more spontaneous fun. Saints games, tons of local festivals and parades, the zoo, Icy Cup, fishing and swimming, and lots of restaurants and concerts. We only really took one road trip this summer and it was a short one to Madison. We decided to have a garage sale on Amelia's due date. It went pretty well and we just packed it into the garage to open up again the next day, but the next morning Amelia went into labor and we ended up leaving for the hospital at 7am. So that's what we've been up to.
