First Day of School 2011

Ellery's Blessing

We blessed Ellery during Fast Sunday today. She looked adorable in her beautiful white dress--the same dress that I wore when I was blessed as a baby, and the same dress that Addison wore.

It was wonderful to see her surrounded by worthy priesthood holders and hear the beautiful blessing that her dad pronounced upon her.I won't lie, though. It was a hard day. More than any day since we've moved to Texas I missed our family. It surprised me just how sad I felt at not having our extended family be there to witness her blessing. Our ward family is great, but it's just not the same! This was the first one of our kids who did not get to have their blessing recorded by Auntie Kara's shorthand. I sure am missing evryone today.

It's a Girl!

Announcing the arrival of Ellery Clare Hummer, born Feburary 9, 2011 at 5:00 PM.

As predicted, she was a big girl, weighing in at 9 pounds 14 ounces, and measuring 21 3/4" long! She is the first of our kids to be born with pinchable cheeks and cute chubby thighs. My doctor had advised a c-section at the last minute, when he discovered in an ultrasound a few days after my due date that she was measuring close to 10 pounds. (At a previous sonogram just 5 days earlier, he had predicted she'd be in the 7 pound range--oops!) The risk of delivering a baby that large via a VBAC were deemed too great, so a c-section was scheduled on the very day that I was to be induced. It turns out that the c-section was a safe bet, as she ended up being just as big as they had predicted!
What no one predicted, however, was that she would be a girl. After a whopping 5 ultrasounds, we still had opted to be surprised as to the baby's gender. At the last ultrasound, though, my doctor kept referring to the baby as a boy: "I can't get a good view of his face, because he's got his hands in front of his face." I left that appointment sure that it must be a boy. The whole OR staff knew this story, and knew that although we were being surprised, we suspected it was a boy. When she came out a girl, they all erupted in cheer, as it's not very often they witnes a true surprise like that one. They put a cute little feminized version of the standard baby cap on to celebrate.

The benefit of going past my due date is that Grandma Kathy had already arrived by the time Ellery was born. And by a joyful act of providence, Grandpa Steve had decided to come after all, arriving just in time the night before the c-section. How blessed we were to have Grandma and Grandpa home caring for our other kids while we were in the hospital!

In order to minimize the chaos as much as possible, Grandma and Grandpa brought the kids up to the hospital to meet baby Ellery in shifts. Mason and Grady came first, while the older kids were in school. They were very intrigued by this new little person!

The big kids came later that evening, and all got a turn holding their new sister. (Holy cow! A sister!!! The girls, especially, were very excited that we are now all tied up, 3-3!)

We are still pretty shocked ourselves. I won't lie--we had hoped for a girl to even things up, but thought that would be too good to be true, so we were happy to have any healthy baby, boy or girl. Having grown to expect it to be a boy, however, it took quite some time to get over the happy shock! We still find ourselves asking, "Did we really have a girl? How did we get so lucky?" We couldn't be more thrilled to be blessed with such a beautiful, healthy baby girl. We've been smiling for days! You can even see it on the exhausted new daddy's face:

Welcome to the world, sweet baby girl. We're so happy to have you!