3+ Months . . . from Liz

Liliana has so much hair, i can't even tell you. There are photos of it - one moment - okay, here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thebazil (um, scroll down a bit).

Also she's showing Erica up and rolling over plenty often. (For the uninitiated, Erica is three months older.) And Lily smiles at you and god, i love it when babies smile at you. And she has the cutest crinkly little smile and she peeks up at you and it's just absolute perfection. And you know you look at the pictures and you think she's cute, but then you meet her and she's so much cuter. (I totally meant to get a million pictures but then i got there and was too busy being awed. I have come to the realization that i am in love with baby noses. So small! So nuzzly!) So we got to their house (because they are so talented with the direction giving, those Seattle folk) and we all traded babies and cuddled for a bit and Liliana is so zen that Marita could go off to an appointment (well, leaving us with Mike still home, but busy) and we got to completely monopolize all the babies - both Liliana and Logan (who is shockingly running around awfully well at not even one yet, making one think about babyproofing very very soon and up to at least three feet), plus Erica - which was a little chaotic, but fun - and Liliana could just cuddle us strangers and be perfectly happy. Wow. And then Marita came home and we had more musical babies and cuddling, and then we went for a walk because their neighborhood has a nice park and a lake and whatnot (albeit at the bottom of a very large hill) with us two and our matching Ergos. Heart. (Tie dyed baby clothes. More heart.) And then - then! Marita is a hero.

Did y'all get that? A hero.

Because only a very extraordinary person could make many pans of lasagna, enough to serve, what, a dozen people, even sending some of them home with more lasagna and still having leftovers, while having a three month old. (Especially a three month old this cute, who you just want to cuddle and cuddle and cuddle.)

Let me also mention the insanity that is having lots of kids close in age all in one room: you realize exactly how short this all is. That, sure, we're carefully combing through The No-Cry Sleep Solution right now, but when she's eight or nineteen she almost certainly won't still be waking up at two and wanting to nurse. That Logan is able to do all these things, walk, run, terrorize the dogs, show motive and decisiveness, throw things across the room, and we're more than halfway there with Erica, agewise, and Lily is more than halfway to Erica's chattery wigglebutt stage. And while they are people now, they are very rapidly growing and becoming and turning into toddlers and real kids. This is all so vastly different from a year ago - back then none of us knew what was coming. Quite honestly i don't think we know what's coming now, either, but you get these daddies and they look at their babies and smile because everything is completely different, now, and i always say everything is like the sun coming out but it's like the sun coming out. And you never knew there was a sun. And Marita is glowing with it (official MILF inauguration, right there) and Ian is pretty glowy himself - whenever Liliana is near either of them they get that goofy, unaware grin. Did i say yet that they were great parents? Great parents, and great lasagna-makers, i should point that out.

I just have to marvel again (because i have a new space for it, whee: i tricked them into letting me on their blog! king me! captured! Borg wins! ahahaha, everything is my blog!) that people have been feeling this way about their daughters since the beginning of time, right? They must have. And people said we'd love our kids, but noone mentioned that we'd feel like this. And people said everything would change, but nobody told us everything would change. And someone might have said how nothing else would matter, but nobody commented on the crashing irrelevance of all that had gone before. Um, Other People? Where are your communication skills?

Love from Vienna,
Liz, Matt, and Tiny-But-Now-Slightly-Larger Erica