Our little ray of sunshine

The other night, I got home to find Andrea giving Calli her nightly bath (I'm sure we could get away with bathing her every other night, but we're using a Lavender-scented bath to help her sleep. I'll never know if it's working, or if she was just due to start passing-out earlier, but I'm not messing with a winning formula!). Andrea said, in her most serious tone, “go ahead, ask us how our day was.” I groaned, then obliged her. “It was wonderful. Barely a fussy moment. This is what I'd hoped motherhood would be like.”

Andrea had found the pregnancy gods to be fair – no morning sickness, but gestational diabetes – so it seems the parenting gods are fair too. For every episode of contraceptive-inducing fussiness, there are days that we like her as much as we love her.

It seems that it may have been a developmental thing, at the tail-end of her miserable phase, she began grasping things more than ever. It's amazing to watch these developments, and to be just flush with pride when such simple things happen. I mean, when I make other people laugh, I'm a little proud, but when I make Calli laugh, I feel like the guy who cured Polio!

While she's always chewed her own hands, she has now taken to chewing on ours! She looks like a cartoon of a cave-dweller diving into an over-sized drumstick, with the appropriate “Aaagh” noise. In the last 4 1/2 months since she's arrived, I've been some-kind-of-retentive with my hand-washing, but now I've upped the ante. The last thing she needs is cinnamon heart residue. (I've eaten enough of those to make me afraid of burning red dookies).

Speaking of which, Andrea found the coolest shirt for her, it has a circle-controller like an iPod, but it says “iPooped.” Like a 13-year-old, I laughed my ass off!