Pure Delight

Molly is seven months old now and she has finally officially become a "real" baby. She has graduated from a smiling, contented lump of mashed potatoes to a drooling, opinionated crawler. She is still a very content baby, sitting for long periods of time with toys surrounding her and entertaining herself, but she shows a bit of sass now and again. Her favorite time to get spunky is around meal time when she holds her legs straight out in front of her at a ninety degree angle so that I am unable to weasel her into the high chair. She has a love-hate relationship with food. She often cries angrily while eating but keeps opening her mouth for more. Kind of like me with Chocolate Moose Tracks ice cream: hating myself with each bite but barking at Dean to leave the carton on the counter because I'm not done with it yet.
Her favorite toys are the remote control and the telephone. I try to check periodically that she doesn't make long-distance calls. We have had two unfortunate instances in Frankie's history involving the telephone as toy. First was when she called my friend Nathan, who lives in L.A., at 2:30 in the morning, since it was 5:30 our time and she was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. I was probably half-comatose and handing her anything to keep her quiet: phone, bottles of Tylenol, razors. Because he has caller ID, he called back a few minutes later telling me that he could hear heavy breathing and he didn't know if he should call 911 on my behalf. As though in the middle of a home invasion my first thought would be to call Nathan in California for assistance. Second, Frankie called 911 recently and again, hung up. Since we have a VOIP, we still have the same phone number from when we moved two years ago, and our provider still has our old address. Whoops. An hour later, a uniformed officer came to the door to check on our welfare.
Molly has also started to crawl and does so in the nice coordinated manner that babies should. Frankie always humped her right leg in front of her and it was a disturbing sight, like a wasp you've partially squashed but keeps trying to make an escape with half its thorax collapsed and two legs broken.

Molly is also a fan of the loud rebel yell. I have to clamp my hand over her mouth when Frankie is napping because it is loud enough to wake the dead. She does it for fun and often accompanies it with a lot of very spitty raspberries. She also seems to show an uncanny intuition about which toys Frankie does not want her touch. She will grunt and heave herself over my lap to get to Frankie's precious Gordon train, which inevitably elicits a great deal of despair and wearing of ashes and sackcloth.
It is still such a revelation to have an infant who actually sleeps. We put her down when she is tired and she actually puts herself to sleep. And wakes up so quietly and cheerfully that we are lucky we have a video monitor so we know she is actually awake. Please, support cloning research because you are going to want to make multiples of this child.