i feel like a horrible mom! how did i get this far behind in documenting my sweet mira?!

anyways, the past couple months have been a whirlwind! mira enjoyed her first thanksgiving and christmas!



we waited until 6 months to let mira try solids. her first food was sweet potato, and at first she wasn't sure what to think. but after a couple days she was eating like a pro! we did baby led weaning again this time, so we let her feed herself. so far her favorite food may be bananas. she's already developing a serious pincher grasp!

shortly after she turned 5 months she started to sit up pretty well by herself. now she's a total pro, though she hasn't really tried crawling that much yet. she's also still toothless, which is a surprise to me since her teeth have been bothering her like crazy for months!

at her six month check up she weighed in a little over 16lbs...which was almost 3 lbs less than her big sis at that age! no worries though, she isn't starving...she's still in the 61st percentile. :) we're so blessed that she's a super healthy child!

she also got dedicated at our church in november and was a perfect angel baby playing peek-a-boo with the pastor while they prayed over her!



she's still as chatty as ever. i swear the other day she was crying and said mama! but i'm still waiting for her to do it again. :) she hasn't developed a sense of stranger danger yet. she seems to be my little socialite, so we'll see if that happens. she enjoyed being around people during the holidays, and she actually showed interest in some of her christmas gifts as well as the wrapping!

i love this little sweetheart!

hello. my baby is 5 months old. please stop the time!



little mira turned 5 months while we were in india. (india deserves a whole other post!)

she is just such little wonder. at 5 months she is so delightfully social. she was definitely the crowd pleaser on our trip!

she loves her big sister and thinks her screaming at the top of her lungs is just hilarious, though the rest of us beg to differ!

she's drooling like crazy and putting everything in her mouth. every day i check to see if a tooth as cut through!

her sleep is all messed up at the moment thanks to jet leg, but she seems to be nursing more at night these days. could be the teeth. she's still a good little sleeper though.

right when she turned 5 months she was trying to sit up on her own but still lacked the balance. in the past couple weeks she's gotten the balance down too, though i'll still put a pillow behind her. ;)

oh, and she has officially become a thumb sucker! we fought it as long as we could and would try to exchange the thumb with the paci, but she gradually seems to be winning on this front. :P

her pic this month is with her sister's zebra since we left kermit the frog stateside while we were in india. i love this little kid to the moon and back! what a blessing!

mira celebrated 4 months with a cold...poor baby!



i still managed to get some smiles out of her though. at 4 months she weighs almost 15 lbs, and was 24.375 inches tall. She was pretty solidly in the 65th percentile for everything, and perfectly healthy other than the cold she picked up from her big sis! ;)

she is still super sweet and social! now she is laughing, and has started rolling from back to front and a little bit from front to back. she is pretty much a drool factory and her sleep isn't as great as it was a couple months ago, so i suspect she may be cutting some teeth in the near future. she also loves watching video like praise baby and anything her sis is watching. she also loves her walks and being outside.



i'm crazy about this kid!

Well Jia has officially started preschool!

baby girl is getting big!



at 3 months old all the rolls are coming in. she's started trying to grab things with her hands, and it takes major effort these days for us to keep her hands out of her mouth. someone wants to be a thumb sucker, so we're still pushing the paci! she's started drooling as well so i'm wondering if these are the early days of teething.

every day though she is more and more of a delight. such a sweet kid! i love her little easy going personality! it's hard to imagine our lives before her. her and her big sister are just obsessed with each other. love my girls!

well my littlest munchkin is now 2 months old!
oh the joy of being 2 months and receiving the blessed gift of shots!



baby girl was a trooper though. just was a happy baby all through her appointment and just cried for a few second when she got poked. she's grown to 12lbs and 1.5 ounces, which is just a couple ounces smaller that her big sister was at that age! so even though she started off more than a pound smaller, she's catching up!

mira has her fussy moments, but if eating doesn't fix it, she can usually be calmed by a stroll. she's over all such a dream baby. happy, chatting, cooing, and regularly sleeping 6-8 hour stretches at night!

this kid has taught me more than ever that parenting skills have nothing to do with a baby's sleep patterns. with jia i went by the book to try to make her a good sleeper, and it never worked. she just became a good sleeper on her own time. but mira loves to sleep and with the craziness of having a toddler i've had her in no kind of routine whatsoever. kids are so different!

anyways, i'm loving having 2 girls. jia loves her sister...sometimes a little too much, but her heart is in the right place! ;)

well, my baby is already a month old, and i'm already behind in keeping track of things!

i did monthly updates with jia for the first year though, and i intend to do the same with mira. i'm just taking her picture with my childhood kermit toy each month to see her growth and remember notable details. i guess this is the modern version of a baby book! ;)




from the start mira has been a pretty tranquil kid. at one month she slept a 6 hour stretch at night, and she usually just wakes a couple times a night. if she's fussy, she's pretty easy to figure out so far. she either wants milk, her paci, or to walk around (being held upright of course though so she can see!) but yeah, speaking of that, she takes a PACI! jia never would so this is a whole new world for me! i kind of love it. let's see if i still love it though when it's time to wean her! :)

like her big sister, mira could pretty much hold up her head and kick off with her feet from the start, and she's already a fan of tummy time! i suspect that with a big sister to keep up with that this one might go mobile early.

so far her eyes are still bluish, so the pediatrician suspects that they may stay light instead of going brown. at her one month appointment she was already 10.4lbs and had worked her way up to the 75th percentile! so she's about the same size as her big sister at that age! so she had gained nearly 3lbs and more than 2 inches in the first month! i like my babies chunky! ;)

we're crazy about this kid already...it's hard to imagine our lives before she arrived! 

1. How old are you? - 3
2. Who is your best friend - Cora
3. Favorite thing to do? - play things
4. Favorite color? - yellow and orange and pink and red and blue
5. Favorite food? – sandwich
6. Favorite song? – Uptown Funk and Let it Go
7. Favorite animal? - Zebra
8. Favorite toy? - Zebra (toy zebra named Sita)
9. Favorite TV show? – Berenstein Bears
10. Favorite book? – Anna and Elsa
11. Favorite movie? – About the dinosaurs (Land Before Time)
12. Favorite treat? – chocolate
13. What do you want to be when you grow up? – big
14. What makes you happy? - Cora
15. What makes you sad? – Cora
16. What do you like to do with your family? – gymnastics
17. What do you like to learn about? - ABCs
18. Where do you like to go? – library
19. What do you think about before sleep? – tired
20. Who would you like to meet? – Jesus


here's a little survey we're going to make an annual tradition for the birthday girls around our house! it will be fun to see how the answers change through the years. jia is at an age right now where her thoughts absolutely delight me!


despite being less than a month post partum, we decided to throw a birthday party at our place for jia this year...partly to make her feel special during the adjustment with a new baby, and also because my father in law was coming to visit from india for the first time and it seemed like a great chance to introduce him to the people we're close to!


for months jia had been asking for a "pink butterfly birthday" so that's what we did! 

















jia was delighted, so i'd say it was a success! she's been such a great big sister so far, i'm glad we took some special time to focus on her. seriously though, this kid is in love with her baby sister. it's amazing that i was so afraid of her feeling displaced! now she says she wants "10 baby sisters!" lol. that baby is her pride and joy! hopefully this is just the beginning of a beautiful friendship! ;)

let me introduce you to the newest member of our family.
mira grace anima pathak.



mira decided to show up a few days early, unlike her older sister who kept us waiting. she was born friday, may 22 (due may 26) at 5:26pm, and weighed 7lb11oz.

i'm feeling so incredibly thankful and blessed to have this beautiful addition to our little family. her delivery was also an answer to prayer with no complications since there had been some concerns later in the pregnancy about the placenta being a little too low for a normal delivery. thankfully things moved to where they were supposed to be in time for her to arrive, and her arrival into the world was relatively much easier than her older sister's!

she let me know wednesday late night/thursday early morning that she might be interested in spending memorial day weekend with us with contractions that started happening about 10 minutes apart. i've never really been one to have braxton hicks, so these made me pay attention. i had a regularly scheduled doctor's appointment thursday morning, so i asked the doctor about it then. he said just time would tell me if this was the real deal or not, and i was just dilated to a 2 at that point, so not enough to indicate that i was in labor.

the contractions continued through the day, but they stayed about 10 minutes apart. my mom went ahead and came up to our place in the evening though because she was pretty sure i was about to have a baby. i still wasn't sure this was it, even though the contractions felt intense when they came. i really didn't want to go to the hospital and get sent home, so there was no way i was going until they were 5 minutes apart or less, although i was getting lots of pressure from my mom and grandma to go on in since second babies tend to be faster. i figured since my first labor was 36 hours i probably was in no rush!

finally though around 2am on friday morning the contractions became consistently about 5 minutes apart, so i agreed to go on in to the L&D and see what was up.

so we got all checked in, and the nurse checked me out and i was dilated to...a 2!!! :P ugh!! i was so disappointed. but since the contractions were steady they wanted me to stay for a couple hours to see how quickly i progressed now that they were close together. thankfully i started to dilate about a cm per hour at this point, so a couple of hours later when the on call OB came by to see me i was dilated to a 4, which was enough of a cervix change that they let me stay! it turned out to be a good thing i had come in early that day though. apparently everyone who was pregnant decided to go into labor that friday morning, and the hospital actually ran out of delivery rooms! so i got there early and got my spot. :)



around 9-10am they checked me again and said i was dilated somewhere between a loose 5 and a tight 7 (6 maybe? lol), and at that point after 2 nights of little to no sleep i was ready for an epidural. after waiting through 30 hours of active labor last time to get it, i told myself that if i was sleep deprived with this delivery that it would make no sense to wait so long this time...last time the nap i got with the epidural was the only thing that gave me enough rest to have energy for the actual pushing!

so i went ahead and got the epidural once the anesthesiologist was available, and took a glorious nap! somehow the getting to rest and relax actually seemed to speed labor along a bit. i think just being able to relax and rest did me some good. since i was steadily progressing, the nursing staff actually encouraged me not to take pitocin or anything, which i always appreciate an L&D that doesn't try to force drugs on me! that's why i love this hospital. they really try to go with your birth plan. but my birth plan this time mostly just consisted of just "get the baby out!" :)

at some point they broke my water since i was getting pretty dilated, but little girl's head was still up a bit high. they thought maybe it would help her to work her way down.

eventually i was dilated to a 10, and they tried to have me do various things to help her work her way down into a lower station, which worked somewhat though she still wasn't quite as low as they hoped by the time i was really strongly feeling the urge to push.

so they let me go ahead and push, but warned that i might be pushing awhile since she was still a little high.

however, 20 minutes later i was holding my baby girl!

most of the time i was pushing, not a lot was happening. then all the sudden on one really good push, she just came out completely!! i wasn't even crowing yet, and the doctors and nurses hadn't even set everything up! lol. everyone was pretty surprised. their guess was that she had her head at a weird angle that was keeping her up higher, but once she turned her head she just came flying out! :) i can't complain. 20 minutes of pushing wasn't bad at all compared to the almost 1.5 hours with my first!
and since this little one was a pound smaller than my first that made it feel even easier this time. not as much damage on the way out! ;)



at the end of my first birth experience i remember thinking that i never wanted to do that again...but immediately after having mira i was feeling so great that it made me a little sad that this is most likely my last one! things going so easily was kind of exhilarating. i'm thankful for what was over all a great birth experience, but most of all for a healthy baby girl!

everyone at the hospital was great and took such good care of us, and i can't say enough nice things. i had a great experience with them last time, but this time they had made some new changes that i really appreciated. like giving 2 hours of skin to skin time immediately after delivery!

so far mira has been a joy. of course she has her moments like any newborn, but she seems overall to be a pretty laid back gal.



we had a short list of names, but were still undecided about which one it would be when she was born. however, jia was set on the name mira, which seemed like a good fit for this little one once we met her. the indian meaning for mira is ocean, and she definitely reminds me of a tranquil sea...most of the time. i also loved the latin meaning...full of wonder. she's our little miracle.
her middle names are after her great grandmothers.



and she is simply adored by her big sister. this is such a special little season in our family...i wish i could just press pause on time and savor this sweet moment!

i was checking out my blog stats, and thought it was curious to see that my consistently most popular post is the one i wrote several years ago when we were dealing with some health issues my husband was going through. 

so this baby is due next month and now i'm getting the feeling i should write a few things down before the pregnancy is over and i can't remember anything before that cute little one.

this pregnancy has been a bit rougher from the start. our trip to india in the first trimester though could be partially responsible for the extra morning sickness and fatigue though. but the sickness seemed to stick around a little longer this time.

by about christmas time though i started to feel more like myself again, plus things always get a little more fun once you start to actually look pregnant.

i actually may have started showing a little later this time around, but this kid has really made up for lost time in the last month or so. i definitely feel just a huge as last time at this point, if not bigger!


seeing the belly grow has been exciting for jia and really made things start to click for her. plus she got to take a big sibling class at the hospital which was pretty cool.

the tough part with a toddler this time around has been trying to keep up the bigger i get!

this week i paid the consequences of that as i fell from a swing and landed hard on my bottom! i wasn't hurt, but when i stood up my pants were wet! now, with a 25lb belly sitting on my bladder at this point i knew it was very possible that i had just peed myself, but this far along there is just so much pressure down there that it's impossible to know where anything is coming from, so we went to the hospital just to make sure i wasn't leaking amniotic fluid. after a quick false positive test at the hospital that totally freaked us out, they ordered the better fluid test to confirm. if you're leaking amniotic fluid you basically get the joy of living in the hospital bed until your baby arrives. i could not even think about spending a month in that room so we were praying like crazy! thankfully that fluid test told me i'd just peed myself, and i've never been so happy to hear embarrassing news like that!


another interesting thing we're keeping an eye on this pregnancy is that i have a low placenta. at our 32 week appointment it was borderline...almost a safe distance from the cervix, but not quite. apparently where your placenta ends up is totally random and based on wherever the embryo decides to implant at conception. however a low placenta can mean dangerous hemorrhaging during birth so often a c-section is required. but unfortunately my placenta is also in the exact place where they would normally go in for a c-section, which means the old school more complicated kind of c-section would be likely. so we're praying hard that things will still move a bit more! despite having a horrifically long vaginal delivery with jia, i'd much rather deal with the recovery from that than an old school c-section!

but other than all that things are going well. of course heartburn is a major part of my life at this point, but i think that's par for the course when you're carrying a hairy half indian baby! ;) thankfully this time i'm taking nexium, which is working miracles! i wish i'd known about it last time! also i may be less achy this time...maybe my body has already been broken in! :)

i have my usual cravings this time around...eating ice and smelling rubber and leather. weird i know. which i did discover i'm a bit anemic at my hospital incident this week though, so that could explain things. and at least i'm not eating anything weird!

i'm getting excited to meet this kid though. she seems a bit spunky, and is often hanging out in some crazy position when we get to peek at her in ultrasounds. but still it would be best if she gets to hang out in there until around her due date though because i still have so much to do!

so with our daughter jia we decided to be surprised and wait until the birth to find out the gender. it was a ton of fun, and i totally recommend it! after a hard 36 hour labor it was a pretty cool moment to look down and learn i had a baby girl.

probably some of my other favorite things about waiting to find out were hearing everyone's guesses and wives tales, and getting a lot of practical baby gifts rather than being over loaded with blue or pink. however i'd say the cons were the annoyance of constantly being asked what i was having, and being terrified every time i visited the doctor's office that someone would give it away! lol.

so this time we went into the pregnancy totally prepared to not find out the gender again. however one day my husband had a change of heart and suggested that maybe we could find out this time since there's a good chance this will be our last child, just to experience it both ways.

at first i wasn't sold on the idea, but then when jia started saying she wanted a "girl baby" and i realized she wouldn't be there in the delivery room to share the moment of truth with us i changed my mind. this is a big life event for all of us as a family now, so we decided to share as much of it as we could with jia in a fun way.

my family was meeting up with us for my birthday the same week as our 20 week ultrasound, so it seemed like a good time to do an intimate little gender reveal party.

during the ultrasound anatomy scan we asked the tech to seal the gender up in an envelope for us rather than tell us right there. strangely we were watching the whole ultrasound and didn't even notice when she took a peek at the genitals. i usually have no idea what i'm looking at unless someone tells me apparently!

later that day we handed the envelope off to our good friends with instructions. we decided to do the whole balloons in a box style of reveal since jia loves both balloons and opening gifts...it seemed like a win/win!

on the day of the reveal jia started to change her tune and say she wanted a boy baby. after some conversation we realized she didn't really know the difference between a boy and a girl...try explaining that one to a toddler! lol.

let me preface the big news by saying that another reason i was ok with finding out this time was that i knew i would be completely equally happy with either outcome. with our first pregnancy i had a slight secret preference for a girl, just because i knew that was what shomik really wanted! so since we already had our girl that took some pressure off. but i loved the idea of this one being a girl so that jia would have a sister, which is something i never had and i hear it can be such a special relationship. also, from a practical standpoint, since the babies will be almost exactly 3 years apart, and of jia's girl stuff would totally work for another girl. but my husband and i are also both from families of 2 kids of the opposite gender, so a family with a boy and girl is something we're familiar with, and a boy would be fun and new!

but i knew that God would give us whatever we needed, so we were excited for the box to reveal....



another GIRL!!!

and jia was super excited about pink balloons! lol.

so it looks like shomik will continue to be the king of the house, and he is absolutely thrilled. he told me afterwards that he was secretly hoping for another girl. i think my husband may be a bit sexist...against his own gender! lol. though i know that the father/daughter relationship is such a special one so i don't blame him for reveling in that, and i know for a fact that little girls are a blast!

i must say that so far i have no regrets about finding out. it's really fun in it's own way and i'm glad for both experiences! :)



so we're feeling very thankful and blessed, and most of all we're thankful for what looks like a healthy baby! thanks for all your love and prayers!