Who's So Sleepy?

I get some unsolicited advice from older women about baby. Today at the supermarket, for instance, a woman working as a bagger said it was a good thing there was a cap on the pen that I was allowing baby to teeth on, that her mother probably wouldn’t like to see a mouthful of ink when we got home. Now, I didn’t mention to the woman that my baby is universally praised as incredibly alert and pleasant everywhere we go and that some part of that may come from the fathering she gets, or that so far in her life there have been a total of zero ink spills anywhere on her person, because to do so would have been to be more defensive than I want to be with people I’m meeting for the first time. But it was tempting.

Every day, baby seems to have about ten percent more personality, which is to say that she’s talking more, laughing more, playing more avidly with toys. Apart from the trip to the market, we were cooped up indoors all day, but she found the rain outside the windows worthy of several prolonged looks. The sound of the rain on the roof also seems to make her naps a little longer, and deeper. Tonight she woke from a nap for a brief appearance at the table about midway through dinner, and it may have been the sleepiest I’d ever seen her outside of bed. She still managed to smile across the table between yawns.