Smile? What is smile?

First off I’m not saying that any of this is a routine or anything like that. Just some recent observations, that is all. Don’t want to put a jinx on it …

We still get an unhappy “hour” somewhere between 3 and 7pm, although it isn’t an hour and isn’t always totally unhappy (disenchanted with one’s current world-view perhaps?). Sometimes a simple change of scenery is all it takes to alleviate the crisis. The photo was taken mere minutes before yesterday’s meltdown. When I took him upstairs to check/change the gdiaper all was well, back downstairs for a few minutes and he started up again. The second time he had the Muh cry: where he is crying and closing/opening his mouth and making a Muh type of sound.

It could have been total, randomized chance that he eventually said “MaMa” (or MuhMuh) but I’m not above taking him back upstairs to his mother and saying, “He asked for you,” and dropping him off. That and it seemed to be what he wanted, for unhappy hour was over.

The other two patterns are my favorites so far. At 8:30-9:00pm I’ll put him to bed in his crib, turn on the frogs (he got a Fisher-Price light-show/sound generator with nature sounds), and shut off the lights for the night. He might not be ready for sleep, but he doesn’t complain. In fact some nights he’ll lay there for an hour, eyes wide open looking around the darkened room, before he eventually falls asleep.

The next favorite time is 5am. Four or four thirty is a bit too early, but five in the morning is a fine time to start the day and that’s what we do every day. Dad fires up the espresso machine (brought home from work shortly after Zane was born), gets out a bottle of milk, feeds and burps the Zaner, makes a latte, and then we both go down to the basement office for coffee and breakfast and wiggles and making a ZaneZone entry. Most of the photos on the website are taken between five and six in the morning, when Zane is at his smiliest.

Speaking of lattes, yesterday I ran short of milk. When I went to grab some of Faith’s soy milk (juiced beans should never be called milk!) to top it off I saw the bottle of Zane’s mother’s milk.

“Hmmm…” I thought to myself, “This is wrong on so many levels but we do have over a month’s worth of extra on hand.”

Before committing to a whole latte of the stuff I figured a sample was in order. Got out a shot glass, poured a sliver of the stuff, and gave it a taste test.

I never thought I’d say it, but soy milk is pretty good in comparison. There’s just something off about mother’s milk, a kind of metallic tang. And boy-oh-boy is that stuff sweet! It’s no wonder babies grow so fast with all of the sugar and fat!

Our little hummingbird is now up to 11.2 lbs and says “Mama” because his Dad tried to steal his milk supply.