entirely safe and fun

New photos are up on Flickr, tagged “month four”. My favorite is this one, which is festive and seasonal and smiley, but there are others… with some of Dante’s baby friends… Rule of Cuteness #12. More babies = more cute. The relationship is not linear, either, but rather exponential, until you can’t resolve the individual babies anymore.

The boy acts so much more like a tiny person now than he did before. He takes conversational turns with his noises, occasionally decides to mimic facial expressions, smiles and giggles, and has taken to making a pretty wide range of sounds, with four or five different vowels now. It gets harder each week not to try and interpret what he’s saying as underformed English, no matter how many times I reassure myself that it’s impossible that he would be producing meaningful signals of any sophistication. He’s also become more demanding of attention, as he rolls around now and has become a potential danger to himself and others. The scariest moment so far was the first time we found him sleeping face-down, nighmare-provoking after all the back-to-sleep coaching we got over the course of Punam’s pregnancy and during Dante’s perinatal care. Of course, babies sleep just fine on their stomachs, have been doing it since the dawn of time, etc, but the power of the modern culture of scaring new parents to death cannot be denied.