When I see you smile

J-Money is taking one of her rarely seen day-time naps that is NOT on me. So what am I doing with this time? I am eating breakfast (eggs that I cooked, and not a granola bar!). But I also decided to blog here. Jocelyn has done some cool stuff, and I want to get it captured before it gets lost in a sleepy haze.

At 27 days of life, Jocelyn demonstrated that she can roll onto her tummy. Yeah - scary! It's not in a vacuum - her bed is inclined to help reduce her acid reflux. So if she manages to get herself slightly off of the long axis of the bed, she can roll right down it with enough force. She's a thrasher, even when swaddled, so it was happening. Some sleep positioners have done the trick to prevent the rolling, but now we worry about her wiggling down and pressing her face into the positioner.

She is getting really strong. When I hold her up against my chest, she can hold her head up really well. She doesn't have total control yet, but she can hold it up for minutes at a time. When I 'stand' her against my belly, she really puts a lot of force behind her legs. During tummy time she's great at holding her head up, and can even scoot her little body around really well. She'll be crawling before we know it! It's too bad that she hates tummy time so much, because we'd spend more time there otherwise. It's a good thing to do during her evening colic bouts. We don't want to take a happy baby and make her miserable by giving her tummy time. But if she's pissed off anyway, it's a good use of that energy :-P.

But yesterday morning was the most amazing thing. After J woke up at 6:45, I got her to get back to sleep but only until about 8. Then she wanted to eat some more. So I brought her to my bed to nurse her in the side-lying position, because I was honestly afraid I would fall asleep and I wanted her to be in a space where I couldn't accidentally drop her. Before I started to feed her, I put her on her back and hoovered over her, supporting myself with a hand on the bed on either side of her. I proceeded to make faces at her and she made them back at me. Then when I smiled at her for being such a good face-monkey, she smiled back at me!

Talk about a great way to wake up a mommy! Now, I know that this point it is just a monkey see, monkey do smile, and not actually a social smile. But, WOW. It just melted my heart. As if I wasn't totally head over heels for that kid already, seeing her smile at me just sent me over the moon! And it was worth hours and hours of sleep!

I know I complain about the lack of sleep (hers and, subsequently, mine). And that part is really hard. But this little bugaboo who rocked my world just 33 days ago has really brought me so much more joy than heartache.

I know I owe you all a bunch more pictures. We have a bunch of pictures. It's just hard to get them posted when she won't sleep during the day (or will only sleep on me).

Now... what to do with the rest of this nap of hers. Shower? Or nap myself? I am leaning towards a cat nap of my own. ZZZzzz....