Laughing takes work

A few minutes after Alison's first laugh, we recorded the following:



Clearly, it was just a one shot-deal, and the first of many times that we realized that while she always laughs in company, she never laughs at what we find funny. Later that day, we did manage to catch her at it, but only with quite a lot of effort on mama's part:



In fact, when we laugh, it tends to startle her into solemnity. So how exactly did she learn how to laugh???

A meets Daddy

Whither my girl?

My chatterbox seems to have gone into hiding. From when she was only a few weeks old, you could hold her head in your hands and coo back and forth with her for ages (ages = 15-20 min in baby-time). Early last week she began to increase the volume of her hiyas, gurgles, tongue-rolls, and ha-uuiuuhhhs, but she's gone strangely quiet of late.

It's hard not to ask myself if I did something wrong. Did I make her more passive by wearing her in the sling too much? Am I not playing enough or engaged enough with her? Am I letting her sleep too long because it's convenient for me? Did we shush her too much? ... I suspect these to be foolish questions driven by my perfectionism, not by her good.

Or is she just becoming more interested in observing the world and therefore splitting her time between quiet observation & playing with lips, palate, and tongue?

I don't know her well enough to say. She is my enigma as well as her own. We stare at each other: I, wondering who I'm seeing; she, wondering at her seeing, but perhaps not yet at me.

The Sea

It seems that sometimes, for her, existence is so overwhelming that it feels like a burden, and then she cries and cries, sputtering, choking, gasping for air like a drowning woman. And I lean over her, wanting to throw her my self as a lifeline, but perhaps offering her only more waves of the sea to buffet her little soul. She stares at me with incomprehension widening her eyes and grimacing her face. She is dry, recently sated with food, and not in physical pain, but she has been gripped by something outside of her control, let alone her understanding. To be held is her deepest desire; all else is the vast, heaving sea: my murmurs and little touches, my fingers stroking her forehead, my eyes locked woth hers, my arm cradling her body in the car seat, all wind and waves to her. But still I must buffet her with my presence, for I have nothing else to give. And since she has been given to me and I to her, I know that is enough to be faithful to the call that is also the gift. I cannot mend this plight, but it is not mine to mend. It is mine to bear with her, and hers to bear with me.

Jesus didn't have Pampers

You don't really ponder much at 3am in the morning with a whimpering baby trying to communicate her needs to you, but as I changed her second diaper in 30 minutes...

(aside: she's really sneaky about doing her business right after you changed a diaper that was merely wet but you felt too guilty to leave on her, even though Pampers is so darn efficient at wicking moisture away from the skin you weren't sure she was urinating at all at first)

...and marveled groggily at diaper technology...

(in a stroke of brilliance, Pampers has a little stripe that turns green when wet, thus notifying you when you need to invest another $0.23 or so in their remarkable company. Al is quite the avid investor)

I realized that Jesus didn't have Pampers.

And Mary was taking care of a newborn in a stable without easy access to a washing machine or a host of eager relatives willing to help her in those early days (they didn't even have family housing, for heaven's sake!). So the Word who created all that there is humbled himself to the point of periodically sitting in his own waste and having to cry out to one of his own creatures for help and relief.

We burn through our wipees and cloths and disposables and desitin at an alarming rate with a little one who eats every couple of hours or so and digests what she eats in 90 minutes; these luxuries are in handy little dispensers next to anti-bacterial hand gel for mommy and daddy after the clean-up is through. We call this a stressful period of life with a newborn, but oh how easy it has been made! How often did Jesus have to chafe in a soiled diaper of some sort due to poverty, I wonder? How often did He whimper and cry for relief of His discomfort?

The nitty-gritty of the humility of the Son in the Incarnation strikes me more and more. How often I have agreed that for the Son of God to become a baby is to become so vulnerable, and yet the depth of that vulnerability is in the details, not in the easy generalization. Jesus required near-constant care and attention to the most basic of needs for living creatures, every day, for months on end. He who is life to us chose to need a young woman to sustain His body and to train His limbs, to teach His lips to smile and His mouth to laugh. As I care for our little one, changing yet another diaper and wiping up half-digested milk from her face, I remember Him and worship.

Such is the glory of our God!