My baby girl turned one, and we decided to celebrate with a "bloom & grow" themed birthday party for our little sweetheart! apologies in advance for the massive amount of pics!
My original intention was to keep things really small scale since I went a little overboard on my daughter Jia's first birthday that she found kind of overwhelming.
I simplified by just ordering some jet's pizza (our favorite) and only inviting a few close people, though I did still enjoy the decorating.  I justified making a couple dozen enormous flowers by deciding to decorate the girl's room with them after the party. I also decorated the cakes for the party by myself this time and I was pretty proud of my first attempt!

happy birthday sweet baby!!
if i could rewind this year and live it over again i would. it has been such a beautiful year with our sweet new member. every moment has been pure joy.
one thing i've learned about mira is that when she decides to do something she just does it. she's on her own timeline. like for months she didn't crawl and wasn't too interested in trying, and then one day she just did it like a pro.
now she hasn't started walking yet or really cruising that much, but she just up and decided to start standing. straight up from sitting! she's such a funny kid.
she still just has 4 teeth, but she can already eat like a pro! she eats as much if not more than her big sister sometimes!
berries and pizza are her favorite foods. but she isn't too picky! she also really loves to eat meat.
i love this kid, and it's been my greatest joy this year watching her grow! we love you mira grace!

A few days late, but I can't believe this kid is 11 months! It's hard to get a pic of her being still these days.

She's not walking, but she's all over the place! She now has 4 teeth and she's using signs a lot to communicate. This pic is quintessentially Mira. She loves to hold something soft in her hand while she sucks her thumb. Lately she also holds her hair at the same time. 

She loves playing with her big sister and the dogs. Lately she only wants to be outdoors and will take off outside any chance she gets! 

I'm not ready for the big one year mark coming up! This is going too fast!

baby girl is 9 months of fun, and has been out as long as she was in now!

she still doesn't have a big interest in crawling...she just bounces and scooches on her booty. but that's fine by me. the sitting but not yet mobile stage is my favorite! and she seems to be focusing more of her energy on communicating. :)
she says mama and papa regularly, and tries to mimic a lot of other sounds. she also does 3 or 4 signs and can blow kisses!
she also still has that same easy going temperament. oh, and her favorite food is definitely blueberries!

My big girl is also growing fast! she seems like more and more of a big girl every day.

she loves her school and her friends and she has so many opinions now! she loves all things girlie, pink, purple, and sparkly. she's also imaginative at this age. i love seeing her use her imagination. she has a nonsense phrase she likes to say lately... "meena kompuna." who knows! Oh, and she's a pretty great big sister. I'm super proud of this girl. i'm proud of both of my girls actually. :)

My baby is 8 months old now, and I can't believe all the change that the past month has brought!



She finally cut 2 teeth after months of drooling. She also started saying both "mama" and "papa" in the same week! Thought I have to say "mama" was her first word! ;)

I'm amazed at the verbal ability she already has! She's also got her pincher grasp down, and is eating food like a pro. Blueberries are her current favorite.

She's still not that interested in crawling though, which is something that I'm totally ok with by the way! She does a little bootie schooch, but once she's fully mobile I'm sure it will get crazy around here!

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!

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! ;)

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!