Silly Cheeks!

This kid cracks my stuff up.

I wonder, what's the average age at which a squishmonkey develops a sense of humor?

I think Ava's pulling ahead of the curve on this milestone.

For instance, she doesn't give two pacifiers for "Wheels on the Bus" or "The Alphabet Song", but sing her some Black Eyed Peas (and you gotta really try to sound like Fergie), and she'll air-jig right outta your arms.  She also gets very excited about the ukelele duet from the movie The Jerk.

Ava doesn't just explore the world by depositing things in her mouth like most babies.  Sometimes, just a mischievous lick will do.  I blame myself for this, since I give her dabs of tastes like ice cream, lemon and guacamole when we're out and about.  She'll poke her little strawberry tongue out, and I'll satisfy her curiosity by scooping some bit of deliciousness with a clean finger and dabbing it directly upon her taste buds.  This is fine when we're sitting at El Parian, awaiting our fajitas. This is bad, bad, bad when Honey Boo Boo Dog's humongous face is hovering within an inch of the baby swing.  I wonder what Great Dane snot tastes like.  Ava knows.....

She loooooves to splash.  The first time we introduced her to the pool, she took off like a regatta cup depended on it.  It amazed us that she knew exactly what to do in water -- she instinctively moved her body to propel herself across the expanse, and she kicked and splashed with breathless glee.  This forever changed her relationship with liquids, which was adorable (if not somewhat messy) during every bath time since.  It did, however, complicate her last 
gastroenterologist appointment, where she peed like an Italian fountain on the baby weight scale and splashed around like Michael Flatley until the soggy nurse mopped up her self-made wading pool and I fumbled for some wipes to clean the piddle from her fat rolls.

Most of all, she loves to jabber.  I admit, it shocked the phooey out of me that she would attempt to verbalize much at all.  Every medical text I've consulted discourages holding any expectation of a child with Down Syndrome speaking within the same time frame of a typically developing child.  But don't tell her that.  It seems like one day her speech breaker flipped  ON and she decided that she would spontaneously begin showing off her full vocabulary of baby babble.  Her Bloom County-inspired "Pfffft!" morphed into "blrrbabluhbrrrbrrrbrrrr!" (please reference the video in the previous blog entry for clarification), which quickly became a percussive "Bah bah bah!", which was a short stopover from "Da da da!", after which the brass ring of baby talk was finally attained: 

"MMMMMAMAMAMAAAAAA!"

Yessss. 

I know that parenting isn't a contest, buuuut....

 WINNING!

Predictions, Observations & Statements

She's so precious.

She is a gift. 

You were chosen.

Is she ever not happy?

She's so alert.

I think she's going to be a redhead.

I think she's going to be a blonde.

I think she's going to be bald!

What's that tube do?

She's how old?  She's so small....

You really can't tell at first.

She's pale.

Are you planning on having another?

Does she always breathe this fast?

Is she always this color?

Is this her baseline?

Can I hold her?

She cracks me up.

She's going to be a dancer.

She's going to play the piano.

She's going to be a drummer.  (gulp!)

Is she healthy?

Is she a good baby?

Does she sleep through the night?

He sure is cute. (?!?!?!) if anyone messes with the little feller, just give me a call.

I never put anything on my fridge, but guess whose picture is there now!

I love her like she's mine.

New Tricks!

Fair!

Pushing a baby carriage through a livestock barn is like pulling a lunar rover over the surface of the moon by a piece of dental floss tied to the front bumper.

It's a bit rough.

Other than that, taking our tater tot to the county fair was super duper fun!

I have to own up to my ulterior motives in packing up the family circus and rolling two counties over to the Garland County Fair, where Daddy earned his stripes as a young stocksman during his high school years.  Since I had heard him enthusiastically recant tales of the whos and what-hows of raising and showing livestock there and then,  I thought it would be encouraging for him to return to the place where he had so many positive memories of his formative years and hoped he would reconnect with some of the folks who had been a part of them.

I think everyone in middle America begins to reminisce about their youth this time of year -- the smell of corn dogs and stadium popcorn drift in on the cool  northern frontal air, calling us back to the stock barns, carnival midways and football stadiums.  We become bewitched by September's sentimental spell, allowing it to work its magic upon hearts wearied with workaday worries of the adult world.  Like the children of Hamlin, we follow the piper's song back to the pleasures of our youth, reaching back to touch the version of who we once were.

If we're lucky, we get to experience these pleasures anew through the eyes of our children as they explore these worlds for themselves.

And if we're especially fortunate, we're afforded the opportunity to guide them through
the same proving grounds of small town identity.  We hope to share the enthusiasm for the wholesome things that sustained us through the turbulence of our own early lives,
those things that helped us make sense of the  world while still remaining safely guarded from it.

And so we will take Ava Leigh to see the fluffy sheep, and the muddy pigs, all manner of chickens both exotic and mundane, and the big blow-dried heifers pulled into the show ring by some determined pipsqueak with a steady lead hand and a sharp stick.  Mommy will make new friends, Daddy will become reacquainted with old ones as he retraces the sawdust paths he once walked a decade ago, and baby will take it all in, learning that there is a welcoming place for her in the refuge he once knew.

Candid.

For every picture of Ava I capture, there are two photo ops and a sitting I've passed up.

Even if I go an entire day without recording our daughter's every burp, smile & bowel movement, I'm confident that we're still squirreling back enough memories for the ages.  I mean, for cryin' out loud, we've unwittingly trained this seven and a half month old child to pause and focus when she finds herself before a camera, iPad or smart phone.  I've often wondered if the cover of Mommy's iPad has the dumbfounding impression of a Death Star hovering above her crib, its black leather cover blotting out the sun.  (And that, my fellow Trekkies, was a Star Wars reference.  You're welcome, Misty.)

It's not that I'm disenchanted with the miracles of everyday life or the lovely family I share it with.  Sometimes I'm positively overwhelmed by the beauty of it.  I just think that some memories are even more precious when they're tucked away into a private album in my mind, uninterrupted by entreaties to Look This Way!  and Smile, Show Teeth!  

Now that I'm grown up, I appreciate that my dad was the king of the candid shot.  In the family pictures of my childhood, we rarely ever assumed a practiced pose.  He just went about the business of snapping away, spontaneously capturing mom's interest in me and my siblings, or the discomfort of three sunburned kids at a theme park, or the glee of a bathing baby in mid-splash, or Grandma with a Solo cup full of caffeine-free Diet Coke en route to her mouth.  Within these actions dwell the details of our lives, the minutiae we would miss if we were parted from one another.  These are the precious things that the arranged Olan Mills portrait cannot reveal.

I want to remember the messy, spontaneous stuff that might not please anyone but me.  Our newborn baby still slathered in birth goop.

  Her tiny round face with a tube snaking from her nose, her face screwed up in her determination to nap in the noisy NICU.  

Ava's first screaming fit in her carseat (which I secretly thought was incredibly adorable). 

 Her victory fist phase.  

Her Gene Simmons phase.  

Her disoriented expression when she woke up in a Lowe's shopping cart.  

Her couch sleeps with her Daddy, all spread across his chest like a flying spider monkey who's body-checked a tree.

I truthfully don't give a flying flip if I ever own a flawless picture of our family. I'm not interested in convincing our descendants twenty or fifty years from now that we were perfect people with Colgate smiles and no awkwardness or difficulty.  I want them -- and you - to know that every faltering, exhilarating step of parenting our daughter with Down Syndrome has been satisfying in ways that will never be apparent to onlookers.  That the sweetness of our days together is strikingly offset by the contrast of the dark undereye circles we've earned over the course of sleepless nights.  That there has been uncertainty and near disaster and inappropriate silliness, even in moments of despair.  That our baby girl reserves the right to wear a bow like a crown, even in a hospital bed or on a quick trip to Walmart.

We celebrate the unscripted.

We frame the mundane.

And my favorite pictures are the ones you'll never see.

Golliwog's First Dip...

....was a splashing success!