Bragging

My daughter is four months old. She babbles, she coos, she blows raspberries and on occasion will open her mouth wide at a request for a "baby kiss" and will plant slobber on your cheek. I always exclaim in delight at this and she laughs. She also laughs when I tickle her or chant nonsense at her.

She scoots along the floor backwards, she loves to stand so much that we bought her an exersaucer before my arms broke from helping her, and she has already figured out how to play with some of the toys. She loves to roll over and is a total champ at it. She likes to watch her hands and feet and will lie there for some time gazing at one or the other.

She nurses a lot but loves to watch me eat. She has grown another two inches putting her above the 97th percentile for height, but isn't gaining nearly as much weight and has dropped from above 90 for weight to only about 80 in two months.

The doctor is impressed.

She is easier than her brother but in different ways -- she's often easier to get to sleep, but I think fusses more during the day (he was easy to keep happy: carry him and never stop walking.) She is more selective and changes her mind over what soothes her more often.

My son ... ah, my son. My son who can do positive and negative number addition and subtraction in his head. My son who read a book about the body with his grandmother who told me later that the only word he couldn't read was "osteo-arthritis", which I figure is fine since most 4.5 year old kids can't read C-A-T and so missing O-S-T-E-O-A-R-T-H-R-I-T-I-S is ok by me. My son who is getting better at controlling and labelling his emotions and coping with them, who weathered the long trip of his father's with aplomb, who hugs and kisses his sister and tells her he loves her, who comforts her when she cries in the back of the car ... my son who is so excited about his books and getting new books and reading them at night and asking "what happens if we read ALL of these mommy? What happens when we are ALL FINISHED ALL OF THEM?" and is relieved to know there are more books on earth than we could ever read.

My son who loves to play with me and hug me and we play a game where we kiss each other all over and I'm just so damn proud of how he has weathered all of it, the past four months. She's growing and changing and becoming a little person, but he's becoming a better person and I can't tell who I'm proudest of because I just don't know. I only know I love them both so much.