matching tracksuits

The Girl slept fitfully last night. Friday night she drifted off at eleven at didn't wake up until five Saturday morning. That is a survivable schedule. Waking up every couple of hours is not.

Morning comes and I take care of the girl while K sleeps. After her 7:00 feeding and burping, L lies on the bed between us, looking up at the ceiling, smiling wildly at who knows what. She turns her head and looks at me and an even bigger smile breaks.

Later in the morning, in the guest room with babcia, she looks at the bright morning light coming in through the window. Calm.

A bit of motion and she looks my way. Of course I have the camera...

A change, some rocking, perhaps a nap -- then it's time to start over.

L's 90 day money back guarantee would have expired yesterday. But unlike the magazine subscription we recently purchased, various CDs we've bought, tons of clothes, pipes, pens, furniture, etc., we haven't said a word about taking her back.

It's not a question of depreciation -- far from it. She's far more dear to us now than when we brought her home from the hospital -- so dear, in fact, that we continue to invest regularly in various upgrades. And she attracts quite a crowd:

"[We think] we'll keep her."

L is almost eleven weeks old, which means she's entering that period where every day she does something new for the first time. A few of the recent firsts:

She's slowly discovering that those spindly things sticking out from her sides are arms -- her arms. This morning she tried to bring her hand to her mouth after holding it in front of her, studying it for a few seconds before slamming her hand directly into...her forehead.

L has added a new cry to her repertoire: the "I'm bored" cry. She likes to be toted around the apartment so she can see anything and everything.

Lastly, she's discovered her voice, and learned that it too is subject to her control. And so she's taken to making vowel sounds to show her interest and her joy. We've captured it twice on video.

K is a cartographer. As such, she has an abiding interest in maps. As such, we have a very nice map of the region of Poland where she comes from (and where I lived for seven years) hanging in our forayer.

L is turning into a smiler. It's gone from "Honey, come quick! She's smiling!" to a many-times-a-day occurrence. In fact, she smiles on-cue now. Sort of.

Whenever we hold L so that she can see our forayer map, she smiles -- 99% of the time. We've caught it on video a couple of times.

The question is, what is so fascinating for her about that map? It has nothing but muted earth-tones; it is extremely low-contrast; it is very detailed -- all the things a baby L's age are not supposed to find particularly interesting. But she loves it -- she comes closest to laughing when looking at it.

Maybe she senses that mom's a cartographer. Maybe she senses that its a representation of her roots. Maybe she just gets off on low-contrast images...

It really began some weeks ago -- the first smile, K says, was when L was six weeks old. I didn't see it for some time, because L would smile once one day, give it a couple day's rest, then smile again -- usually when I wasn't home.

And then she began smiling often enough that I saw L with her eyes sparkling above a toothless grin.

But it took some time to be able to capture that on film memory card.

Now, we can cause her to smile -- if she's in the right mood. All we have to do is flash (and hold) an exaggerated smile and within seconds, she joins in.

The best time to get a smile out of her is after a bath. L absolutely loves being bathed, so much so that it is actually an effective calming mechanism.

And when she's calm and smiling, we're calm and smiling.