Smiles

September Events

Some recent happenings....

A visit from Nanny and Papa. As always, it was wonderful to see them and to watch them love my girls. We also celebrated GG's 81st birthday with the whole Hansen crew... lots of fun.

Two visits from Ty and Sara in two weeks.

While everyone has always said that Mazie looks like Caleb, Athena seems to have inherited more of the Hansen-side features. Many people have said she looks like me or Ahya, but by far the most common comment is that she looks like her Uncle Tyler. This was actually one of the first things I said when she was born! "She looks nothing like Mazie. She looks like Tyler!" (The former statement probably wasn't accurate... the two girls do look alike in many ways. But the second statement still holds up.)

Mazie's soccer debut... playing on a 4 v 4 team with cousins Olivia and Crosby, and friends Treyden, Noah, Quentin, Caetano, and Samyar. The first week was a bit of a disaster -- Mazie (and most of her teammates, with the exception of our ringer, Caetano) spent much of the game in tears. She was frustrated that she couldn't score a goal and that the other kids were faster than her -- not surprising since most of her teammates are 3 like her, and the "league" they're playing in is for kids under 5, so lots of 4 year olds. The funny thing about this is that we kind of went into this whole thing thinking that as long as we, the parents, didn't make it competitive or talk about winning, the kids wouldn't be competitive either. Wrong. Even if she didn't care about the score of the game, Mazie of course understood that the goal of the game was to get the ball in the net, and was super frustrated when she couldn't even get a turn with the ball, let alone score.... Aunt Sara took some great pictures -- here are a few, and there are more in the album at the bottom of this post.





So between games we did some strategizing, and the result was a MUCH better week 2. Caleb's idea was to add a second ball, so that whenever either coach wanted to they could peel a kid off from the pack and let them dribble down by themselves and score a goal. This turned out to be a great strategy -- giving all the kids an opportunity to score worked wonders for team morale and we went from almost ALL the kids crying in week one to NO TEARS in week 2. Huge improvement. We've also been having practice once a week, and the kids have lots of fun with that -- they all have their own ball and get to just play some games that are somewhat soccer-related. Having grown up watching her daddy coach, Mazie LOVES being a part of the whole routine... loves putting on her uniform, loves being instructed on what to do, loves the team talk at the end of practices and games. (Sometimes she'll make Caleb run a practice for her at home, and always insists that he talk to her at the end. "Great practice, Mazie. I thought we did a really great job with the dribbling drills. Next time let's work a little more on shooting.") I anticipate many "most coachable" awards in her future.

Broncos game with Grandpa, whom Mazie has taken to calling "Grampy," "Grampy Pampy," or, most recently, "Grampy Pampers." The Donkeys actually won a game for us, beating the Bengals 24-22.

And here's another wonderful picture of my girls, taken at a picnic at Mazie's school last week. So sweet....

More pictures in this album.

September 2011

One Month

Yesterday was Athena's one month birthday! She keeps getting bigger and stronger, lifting her head up and spending more and more time looking around her world. She's been especially interested in faces and stares intently at the people who hold her, and I think we're ready to officially announce that she has also started to smile. It's hard to say when her first REAL smile was, since she's given us some great "gas smiles" since pretty soon after she was born, but Nanny and Papa were here visiting last week and on their last morning here (Sept 11) she gave Papa a pretty good grin. This morning she smiled at her big sister, too. As Papa put it when Mazie reached this milestone, we are now transitioning from the binary world of "unhappy/not unhappy" to a more nuanced range of emotions.

A note about Athena's name.... As many of you know, Caleb and I actually came up with the idea of naming one of our future daughters Athena during a road trip from North Carolina to Colorado years and years ago -- possibly as long ago as 2003, before we were married. It was our leading girl's name through about 8 months of our pregnancy with Mazie. In the end, "Mazie James" edged out "Athena Lee" for daughter #1 for a couple of reasons. Besides just liking the way the former sounded, and its sort of Southern flavor for our Carolina girl, we had some concerns about Athena being too "big" of a name for a little girl, and we couldn't think of any good nicknames we could use. This time around, we came up with the idea of using "Tea" (pronounced Tay-uh) as a nickname -- it's a name we liked a lot by itself, and even though it wasn't an obvious diminutive for Athena, we thought it worked well enough. Well, after one month, the funny thing is that we have pretty much abandoned Tea altogether -- she is Athena. It does still feel like a big name, but it also fits her well. (She even has gray-ish eyes for now, like a lot of babies -- it's looking like they might eventually go in a bluish direction.) And we have also come up with a few other nicknames for her... Mazie calls her "Bobblehead," "Aflina" (not a nickname but a mispronunciation), or, even better, "Aflina Lee Di'i'son" (the "K" sound is also tricky for her and ends up getting dropped from the middle of words). Her cousin Crosby calls her "Rafina." Less creatively, we've been using "Thena" a bit, and the other day I found myself calling her "Teeny Thenes." So we'll see how it evolves....

Videos

Here are some videos of the girls doing their thing. Mazie continues to be a performer. This weekend she put on a one-girl production of "Cats," which her cousin Mia was in recently. Note the cameo by Papa, playing Mia's role of the "old, wise cat." Mazie was not impressed by his performance.

And here she is dancing at home. Is it just me, or does this one look a bit like Elaine dancing on Seinfeld?

Here is a very soulful interpretive dance to Boyz2Men. (Watch the head-jiggle at the very end.)

Meanwhile, Athena continues to gradually wake up to the world. Here she is just hanging out and stretching.

Our Girls

Athena looking at Mazie, August 16, 2011

From Tiger

It's been nearly 3 weeks since Athena was born. These weeks have flown by, but it also feels like Athena has always been with us. Our transition to a family of four has been incredibly smooth. After Athena's rapid entry into the world, we spent just over 24 hours in the hospital and came home on Saturday morning, August 13. The doctors at the hospital were just slightly concerned about the amount of weight Athena lost in her first 24 hours -- she was born weighing 6 lbs 14 oz and a day later she was down to 6 lbs 8 oz. She then spent the next 2 weeks alternating between sleeping and eating, and by her 2 week check-up she was up to 7 lbs 9 oz, so doing great. We also got some percentiles at this check-up: 84th for height, but just 24th for weight, so we've got a long and lean girl! She's also only 13th percentile for head circumference, which probably at least partially explains her quick delivery and her mom's relatively quick recovery!

Anyway, after sleeping through most of her first two weeks, Athena has just recently started spending longer periods awake and alert. Here's what that looks like, with a little fuss at the end.

From Tiger

So our second child has been pretty easy on us so far. Meanwhile, our first child really couldn't be a sweeter big sister. Before Athena was born, we were pretty optimistic that Mazie would handle her new role well. She talked about "BabyBrotherSister" all the time and during the last few weeks of the pregnancy she would ask me daily if the baby was going to come TODAY??? So we knew she'd be excited to meet the baby, but we still weren't sure how she'd feel when the baby came home... to stay. But three weeks in, Mazie continues to be incredibly loving and sweet to her little sister, giving her lots of hugs and kisses and telling us how much she loves Athena (or "Aflina" -- she's still working on the "th" sound). So we're a pretty happy little family -- definitely tired, but loving our girls!

Here are some pictures of MJ and Aflina... we're still adding to this album.

Meeting her sister for the first time. Mazie got to lift up the sheet and look between the baby's legs to find out if she had a sister or a brother, then went out to the hall to tell Aunt Michelle and her cousins, "It's a dirl!"


Mazie and Nana inspecting Athena in the hospital


Mazie holding her sister


At the Rapids game on August 17, Athena's due date

Visiting Great Gram

First trip to the zoo, August 26

Can't Help Falling in Love

Amazing video by Uncle Logan

Athena Lee Dickinson

It's a girl!

Athena "Tea" Lee Dickinson was born at 8:19 am on August 12, 2011, at Exempla Good Samaritan Hospital in Lafayette, Colorado. She weighs 6 lbs, 14 oz, and is 20 3/4 inches long.

The birth story in brief is that I woke up to my first contraction at 4:59 am, we got to the hospital at about 7, and Athena was born after about 3 pushing contractions (less than 10 minutes). Caleb caught her and put her on my chest, where she spent her first hour and a half cuddling and nursing. In addition to me and Caleb (and our wonderful nurse and doctor), Athena had quite an audience for her birth: my mom (Ahya), Caleb's mom (Nana), my brother (Logan), and our doula (Lisa). Logan and Lisa both took some amazing pictures, some of which we've already posted here. (We'll post more soon.)

Athena hasn't left our room since she was born, and we've spent the day in the company of many loving visitors. Mazie came in less than an hour after Athena was born and said, "Where's my baby?" Not surprisingly, her first interactions with her little sister have been incredibly sweet and loving. She has also been lucky enough to get to spend a fun day with her Aunt Michelle and cousins Haylie, Katelyn, and Crosby -- it's been great to know that she is in good hands while Caleb and I enjoy some quiet first moments with our newest little angel.

Athena was also visited by Uncle Ian, Grandpa Gil, Great Barb, Ty and Sara, Auntie thing, Doug, Lana, Treyden and Carleigh, Mark and Dan. She even skyped her Nanny and Papa in Washington.

Thank you all so much for all the love and support that you give us. It's nice to be home...

Katie, Caleb, Mazie and Athena...oh yeah, and Wiley and Bailey...and the fish.

From Instant Upload