Enigmatic Creature

Babies are enigmatic creatures, or at least mine is. I, like most parents, worry about and look forward to each milestone being reached, but I find myself wondering more what is going on in that little head of hers. Layla is 5 1/2 months old now, and sometimes I feel that I know her better than myself, but sometimes she throws curve balls at me that I just don't know what to do with. She amazes me each day when a new part of her personality emerges.

She is antisocial:
Layla does not like people, and more recently has decided that she HATES my sister. Mind you, we see my sister at least three times per week. Yesterday we picked up my sister and headed to the grocery store. Layla was asleep when my sister got into the truck, and stayed asleep through the transition from truck to shopping cart. My sister was pushing a cart of her own, and I was pushing Layla in my cart. We stopped on the veggie aisle, and that's when Layla noticed that my sister had come along on the trip with us. She began to scream and didn't stop all day.

She is a prankster:
If and only if her diaper is full of an obscene amount of poop, she bursts out laughing as soon as I open her diaper. That amazes me. Tim says maybe she is reacting to my expression, but even the most stoic of expressions will not hinder her from bursting out laughing at my misfortune. I'm not talking a giggle either. I mean full belly laughs where her mouth is formed into a perfect 'O' and her head is thrown back against the changing pad. It's almost as if she is trying to say, "I would hate to be your right now!"

She is determined:
She recently found out that daddy has a beard. She stared at it for a full day before deciding she should familiarize herself with it. She started out by scrunching it in her hands, sort of the way she does her own hair. Later she decided she should really familiarize herself with it by, of course, putting it in her mouth. She spent most of the following day trying to pull it off. We know that's what she was trying to do because she would grab it, yank as hard as she can, then immediately look at her hand like, "Have I got it?" Limited results led to frustration and tears. She has Tim so wrapped that I kept expecting to come downstairs to find that he had shaved it off so he could hand it to her. He wants to give her the world, what's a beard in the grand scheme of things? :-)

Here are a few 5 month old pics of our growing bundle of joy!