Nursing Buddha

Baby Buddha’s first food was apple. Followed now by banana, sweet potato, butternut squash, and carrot. She has the start of two teeth on the bottom, which she is handling with grace.  She’s developed a knee scoot sort of pre-crawl. It mostly sends her backwards in a circle, looks a little like “the worm”…but she is working on it with a Manhattan Project level of dedication that I’m responding to with as much denial as I can muster. A crawling baby is around the corner and on the other side of that corner, she walks, waaah? La lalalala.  I’m not listening. Lalalalala.

She is a screeching howler monkey, and nearly as adept as one at the use of her hands. They are grabbing, snatching, clamping and clawing little creatures of their own will. My hair, my clothes, the very pinch-sensitive skin of my neck, my sunglasses, my cheeks, my delicate eyeballs…everything within a three foot radius of her–it is all literally up for grabs. Her father invented a great self-entertainment system that takes advantage of her velcro fingers and ceaseless energy. It involves dumping her toy box on its side and then setting her in front of this cave of wonder. She will pick and choose toys with a sort of seriousness, like she’s been assigned a complex project at her baby job and she will not be dropping the ball, no sir. Which looks a little like:

She is a huge fan of the bouncy, jumpy chair at her Nan’s house. When she really gets going, it looks like this:

She saw her first, and for a long time to come probably only, snow on Feb. 12. I wrapped her in my coat and she took it all in, with a great deal of surprise. It looked something like this:

And in case you can’t get it from a distance, this is what I mean by “a great deal of surprise”:

A few days ago I turned 33.

And now today’s Valentine’s Day. As Valentines and birthday presents go, she continues to be the best ever. Even if she won’t smile at the camera.