continuing apace

Our little family spent time with many of my local relatives this holiday season. Jacqui did well with nearly all of it -- she's starting to experience some stranger-anxiety, which many people assure me will get much worse before it gets better. Thanks for the encouragement, says I.

It's good that we didn't buy Jacqui toys for Christmas, as everyone else (mostly my grandmother) more than made up for our lack. She's not reading this, but if she were I would tell her -- Thank you AGAIN! :D Jacqui could SWIM in all her new toys.

In fact, speaking of that, tomorrow she'll probably wear her new swimsuit for the first time when we take her to the pool. She had just been wearing a baby-tank top and her swim diaper, because when I signed her up for swim-lessons it somehow never occurred to me that she'd need a swimsuit. (I don't know where The Brain was that day, but it wasn't in MY head.) So I finally found her one, just in time for her 6 weeks of lessons to end.

Part of the problem with the lessons was that they happened at 10am on Sundays. NONE of us were awake for them -- especially not that baby. She'd float around, letting us do all the work while she dozed. We'd propel her toward the bright yellow rubber ducky and sometimes she'd grab at it. Mostly she ignored it. Sometimes she'd grab it and hold it to her chest, like her Long Lost Pal, and then eat its head. We'd kick her legs up and down, and she'd make the face that says, "Rub my back when you're done with that -- oh, and freshen my drink." She didn't mind any of it, but she never really got excited about it.

Tonight in the bathtub, she turned herself over on her bath-pillow and started KICKING. She splashed water EVERYWHERE! It was great! If the tub had actually been the Atlantic Ocean, she could've propelled herself all the way to Greenland! And she'd have met some Greenlander and said, "It's rather chilly here. Have you seen my yellow rubber ducky?"

But wait! Let's back up to this morning, shall we? Because I almost forgot to tell you that when I came downstairs this morning at 11:30, after my Wonderful Geoffrey let me have a few extra hours of sleep because he was working from home and it had been That Kind of Night (it seems to be a day for Meaningful Capitalization), Jacqui smiled so hugely from where she was standing propped against her baby-corral, and Geoff carried her over to me and held her up at my eye-level, and she reached out both of her hands, held my face between them, and gave me the biggest, slobberiest nose-kisses you could ever imagine. It was WONDERFUL.

Tonight on the floor in the family room, she crawled over to where I was laying -- we were watching "Goodbye, Lenin!" -- and kissed my face AGAIN. I think when she's 20 years old and kisses me hello, I'll still get this excited about it. It's just so sweetly affectionate; I just wanted to grab her and hold her forever, but first I had to mop the drool off my chin. 'Cause -- EW.