Welcome Sunny Grace!

Meet our newest family member, Sunny Grace. 🌞 She was born on the morning of January 17th, 7lb 2oz, 21 inches long... crying so loudly that no one could miss it! It felt very much like Sunny was saying "I'M HERE AND I'M AMAZING SO DEAL WITH IT!!!!"

It seems quite appropriate to me that this post is, in theory, six weeks "late"... because she is after all our second kid. Although, to be fair, I tried several times to take her "newborn photos" and each time she would just cry, or spit up on her outfit, or be too tired to look cute. But, third times a charm I guess, because the other day I got her dressed in a cute outfit, calmed her down and then had seven minutes - literally - to shoot these photos before she was over it. I shot my first image at 1:58pm and my last at 2:05pm. I know this because I checked the metadata on my images! Ha ha! 😂

Sunny is such a delight. She's looking more and more like June everyday, yet the two of them are almost nothing a like as babies. June slept a lot, and Sunny is often wide-eyed and crazy looking. Sunny eats like a champ (hallelujah!), where June had much more trouble in that area. June loved to be swaddled and Sunny is, well.... learning to like it. Sunny loves to be held and snuggled, where June often didn't want to be touched. Actually, June's still this way. 😂 Just today I tried to play with her hair while she was sitting in my lap to read a book and she said "Don't do that! No thank you" and ducked away from my hands. Sorry Junie, you got that trait from me!

Unless you are a close friend of mine, or were buddies with me on AIM when my screen name was sunnymorrow, you might not know that my childhood nick name was Sunny Morrow. (In fact, T.J. and my family still call me Sunny!) And that's why we've named our girls June Morrow and Sunny Grace.

My recovery after June's birth was very difficult and complicated, which lead to years of dreading getting and being pregnant again, crippling fear at just the thought of delivering another baby, dreams about the trauma of it all, and then guilt over feeling any of those things because babies are wonderful and "of course I want to have more kids!" And so, from the moment I even started thinking about trying to get pregnant again, I knew I needed grace. Over all of it, the whole time. I prayed endlessly for this time to be different, and redemptive. I proclaimed Grace, Grace! over Sunny from day one, and that's why I chose Grace for her middle name.

Side note: if you weren't buddies with me on AIM back in the day.. man, you were missing out. I had some super cryptic lyric inspired away messages that made me seem super cool. 😂

In the last few weeks I've had to cut all dairy from my diet, and it's made a world of difference for Sunny. So now I just eat sleeves of Oreos to make up for the lack of cheese in my life. I actually had a dream just last night about eating this beautiful Pinterest-worthy yogurt and berry parfait, and half way through eating it I was like "Oh no! This is dairyyyyy, what am I thinkinnnnnng!?!?!" and yet continued to eat it. I honestly never thought I'd dream about a yogurt parfait in my entire life. At least not in a stressful way!

T.J., June and I are so happy to have a healthy little girl in our family. We love you Sunny Grace!