Amy and Amy

 Introducting Amy Belle Mason Reidling...

 and her dad, Michael Douglas Reidling, who looks curious and delighted and not at all terrified.  That's because the terror got used up during delivery, when things suddenly went downhill and an emergency C-section was required.  Great distress and danger for a few minutes, but as soon as Amy arrived, all was well.

And here she is, looking a bit like a drunken sailor and a lot like all of the other babies we've birthed in our family.  Caesarian babies have the prettiest heads, don't you think?  My babies had pointed heads; they could have worn elf caps quite comfortably.

Then, as is never unexpected, little Amy had bilirubin issues and had to stay in the hospital for a day or two longer than her mom, Nicole.  Dreadful, made even moreso because the doctor used the word "dangerously."  But, as is often the case with newborns, danger is averted as rapidly as it arrives.

Her dad said he spent the first night she was home alternately dreaming that spiders were crawling all over the baby (the result of him watching the perfectly wrong movie earlier in the evening) and getting up repeatedly to make sure she was still breathing.  Remember?  It goes on a long time, I think.  I did it with my daughters and with my grandchildren and with my friends' infants:  turned into a frozen statue waiting to see a chest move or hear a sneeze.  I even used that trick a couple of times where you use a mirror to see if steam forms. That didn't work, so I picked the baby up, which is what I'd wanted to do in the first place, and she'd throw her arms up and throw her legs out and scrunch her eyes more tightly closed before opening them to stare judgmentally at me.

Newborns are like my little dog.  She, the dog, is often on the edge of alarm.  Take feeding time.  We've fed her twice a day for a year and a half, and she still looks at me as though I intend to poison her, leaves the room, and returns a few minutes later, having concluded she was safe.  She does the same thing with water:  sniffs it, sniffs me, licks my wrist, and then laps up the water.  Babies aren't as obviously suspicious, but I remember Jenninfer in particular having a grim look on her face for six weeks, as though she were evaluating whether our family was the appropriate one for someone of her amazing capabilities.  At six weeks, she decided to keep us, and from then on she met every morning with singing and grinning.

Here I am with Tara when she was ten months old, and I was nearly twenty.  You can see the resemblance, can't you?  Both babies have ears and hair and sweet tiny hands; pretty soon Amy will be smiling, and the resemblance will be even stronger.

I'm posting a photo of myself and Tara because, although I turned up Amy's high school graduation photo and her sophomore year photo, the laptop isn't hooked up to the scanner, so I can't get them put on tonight.  Something for y'all to look forward to.

Be safe, be kind, be peace.