I love Lulu

I love that she loves it when J.D. and I pretend to eat her. "ZOM-BIE BA-BY," we say in our best zombie voices, and she cackles, so amused.

I love that when we zoom her around the air, she makes what we call her "superhero face." Mouth wide open, nose crinkled. Pure glee and crimefighting adorableness all in one compact package.

I love that she sits in her swing with one leg up in the air. Although I hope we can wean her of this habit by the time she's in high school. As my own mother would say, it's not very ladylike.

I love her enthusiasm, her burgeoning sense of independence. She's new to food, but when we feed her, she grabs at the spoon, already wants to do it herself. I have the feeling that once she can talk, I'll be hearing this a lot: "No, Mama--I do it."

I love reading to her with J.D., and the little asides we make on the stories that we reads. We love to talk about capitalist overlords when we read Mike Mulligan. "'I work faster and better when someone is watching me? WTF kind of Big Brother shit is that?'" Occupy Popperville, everybody, because Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne are the 99%!

When Lulu is tired, she rubs her eyes with her hands like a pantomime of somebody in a play, pretending to be tired. It's infinitely charming. There is something so sweetly innocent about it. When she wants our attention, though, she blows raspberries, total Bronx cabbie style, tongue sticking out, a baby sneer on her face. We can't help laughing at both.

I love the tragic relationship Lu has with the cats. She absolutely adores them and wants them to come near to her--but when they do, she gets so excited, starts windmilling her arms and legs, and the cats get freaked out and run away again. Then she is totally bereft, lip folding down, tears, the works.

I wish I could be as happy about anything in the world as Lulu is to have her diaper changed. This kid loves being naked, loves to glory in her small, pudgy, supersoft and velvety body. I hope she always, always does, that she never wishes she was shaped or assembled any differently from the way she is, because she is perfect and perfectly herself.

I love to dress her for the day. My favorite of her outfits right now is a white dress with tiny blue polkadots, a hand-me-down from Louise's littles. I pair it with a pair of black leggings with multicolored buttons on the ankles, and Lulu looks gamine and adorable and totally '50s, a tiny, roly-poly Audrey Hepburn. (An image she immediately shatters by simultaneously farting and puking. I am sure Audrey never did either one of those things.)

I love the thousand little songs we sing to our girl throughout each day, how we change the lyrics to suit her. "I loves you, Lulu," we sing, to the tune of I Loves You, Porgy. "Mrs. Lulu," we sing, to the tune of Mr. Sandman, "I lo-ove you. When you're not with me, I'm feeling so blue." We substitute words in that old song, Calendar Girl: "I love I love I love my little Lulu girl, every day, every day of the year."

I love the big girl my baby is becoming, but I love that there are signs of the tiny newborn she used to be still in her, too. Yesterday, Lu sneezed, and then sighed--something I haven't heard her do in months. It felt like a reminder, like a gift.

I love everything about this kid, all the tiny pieces that make her who she is today.


Dear God: give me the gift of memory. Don't let me forget a single thing.