Smile!

My baby can't read, but do you know what she can do? She can smile. Heidi is 2 months old today and she can already smile. It takes fourteen muscles working together to make a smile. Isn’t that just awesome? She hears our voices and smiles! Man, kids grow up fast. I can't wait to see what she does new every week. I can't believe it has already been 2 months. Think about your kids today and all the things they do to make you smile, then pass that smile along to someone who needs it.

Baby Shark...do..do..

My baby can’t read and that doesn’t bother me. Do you know why it doesn’t bother me? It is because my baby can do so many other things. It’s amazing to me to think that once we enter this life the first thing we do is cry and the second thing is we want to eat. Have you ever seen a baby react to the smell of breast milk? They can smell their moms when they are in the room. I liken this to my son’s uncanny ability to smell pizza from a distance or how I get when I smell short ribs. My eyes roll back into my head very Homeresque, the cartoon not the writer, mmmmm short ribs. Combine a baby’s ability to smell food with their large dark eyes and to me, they remind me of sharks. Put a bottle of breast milk near Heidi and her eyes get wide her mouth opens, revealing her serrated rows of teeth, and she clamps on for dear life. Ok, she doesn’t have rows of teeth but those gums can be just as bad. Breast feeding moms can I get an Amen? Breast milk in the room is like chumming for sharks in the ocean. I think we’re gonna need a bigger bottle.

Making her mark

You can spot a new parent a mile away. It’s neither the bags under their eyes nor the glassy look on their faces that gives them away. It’s the stains on their shoulders. Left there like some forensic evidence that clearly, we are out of our damn minds. It may appear as if a bird mercilessly dive bombed us on the way in the grocery store like a scene out of Alfred Hitchcock. It may also look like we are the carnie sick-mopper on a miniature version of the tilt-o-whirl. In reality we have spent night and day tending to the care of feeding machine whose sole mission seems to be an endless cycle of what I used to do in college: sleep, eat, drink, puke. Babies do smell good but I’ll tell you what doesn’t…baby puke. If you have ever worked in a stock room when you had to stock milk you know that smell. Sour milk. It still amazes me that Heidi will eat and an hour later, like a cow chewing its cud, she returns my deposit. It doesn’t matter that you have a burp cloth on your shoulder either. You know that baby is going right off the reservation and making her mark on the only exposed fabric on your shirt. It’s not her that needs the bib, it’s me.