Newborns are completely covered for most of their first weeks, an L has been no exception. First, she was swaddled with a cap. Then we began dressing her in sleepers, but the cap remained, as did the mittens slipped over her dangerously sharp fingernails.

I got used to seeing only a round bit of olive skin, eyes closed, nostrils flaring, and the occasional gummy grimace as the crying begins. L was born with a head full of hair, but it was so rarely visible during her first couple of weeks that she might as well have been bald. But then the cap came off and we all got used to her beautiful dark hair, and how much it added to her features: her dark eyes seemed darker; her olive skin seemed more Mediterranean; her faint eyebrows were more visible. She looked less like the cheese-covered bundle of pink, wrinkled skin she’d been only weeks earlier and more like a little girl. It became possible to imagine what she might look like in a year, two years, five years.

Now, the mittens have finally come off, and the effects are equally dramatic. The eyes, some say, are a window to one’s inner thoughts. The fingers, it turns out, can do the same. What’s she touching? How’s she wiggling her fingers? How much control does she have over them? Mittened hands make mysteries of such questions.

Bare hands also highlight fragility. Fingers little larger than a matchstick could probably break with just as much ease.

It’s also now easier to see what she’s wrapping K and me around…