Chiara Alexeika Kincaid

It's been a month since we posted last, and in the interim we've had a daughter. Chiara Alexeika Kincaid was born June 13th, 2008 (yes, that's Friday the 13th), happy and healthy. Everybody asks weight and length and they were 8 lbs 6 oz and 21.25 inches. That puts her somewhere above the 90th percentile of height, and about median in height-to-weight.

There's a link to lots of photos over on the right.

One of the other things people ask, once they see the pictures, is "does she have red hair?" It's too soon really to know. She has light-colored hair and eyebrows with a little bit of brown that can be slightly coppery in the right light. But I was born blond (and am definitely not so now), and Kristiana was too (and still is), so my best guess is that Chiara will start out with light-colored hair but probably not actually red.

The other question people ask - about her, before they get to the questions for us, like are we getting any sleep - is where her name came from. Well, Kristiana and I each kept our names when we married, and we decided Chiara would be a Kincaid. And Chiara (pronounced with a hard C, like key-ara) is an Italian name (not that either of us is Italian), one we thought was pretty. It met the criteria of being a little unusual without being a completely strange and unheard-of. In fact our local newborn resource center knows of another local Chiara being born just a few weeks behind ours. I hope it's not the start of a trend, because I rather hoped the name would remain a little uncommon. As for Alexeika, there is always an Alex somewhere in my family tree, so this was a way to give a nod to my family as well as Kristiana's, though again with an unusual name.

Chiara will be four weeks old this Friday. We've spent all our waking hours, and many of our sleeping ones, with her, so it feels like much longer. She's as perfect a baby as you could wish for - healthy in every respect, only crying when needful (well, more or less), sleeping pretty well at night (four or five hours at a time until she's hungry again), and nicely alert when she's not sleeping.

As for the other two of us, we're doing fairly well. We're not getting as much sleep as we'd like, but enough to get by, and we have enough of a routine now that getting ordinary "life" stuff done doesn't require superhuman effort any more. Hence this long-delayed blog post. Much more about Chiara - and maybe the occasional other subject - will follow.