kerouac says

you should see you! you are a firecracker. you could make a statue giggle. you've been getting a little more sleep, and your even-keeled, friendly personality has erupted into: happiest planet baby ever.

it is unreal. i dare you, later when you can appreciate it, to see it. except you won't, and i will just be that lady who says it all the time.

i'm actually kind of afraid of this. my own mother, i remember her saying very many times: you were such a sunny baby. such a sunny kid! i did not feel like a sunny kid. i felt like a barnacle storm cloud kid, but whatever. i think there was pressure, pressure to be sunny, and i don't want you to feel it. on the other hand, you had to get it from something, so maybe i was sunny as a preliterate elf. who knows.

you are an elf! your smile suffuses you with ... aaaa, i don't know. with great stuff. with stuff that lightens my heart even in this terrible terrible quarter, where i am doing almost nothing i want to do--except you--when i am indentured to the world's worst boss, when i am having my nose rubbed in every misstep, when i am only working, ONLY WORKING and then having a drink and collapsing into bed, in all of this: there's you at the center, and that's what holds. i cringe, sometime, knowing--i said it before--that it will never be this simple again, but now that it is? it's just joy so much of the time, so much more than i'm used to.

your head. your head is so beautiful. your tiny pearl teeth. your six different smiles. your everything you do with your face. the way you've started playing for fun, instead of just to try things. you crack yourself up, and when i watch it's like something expands in my chest. the grinch's heart is growing three sizes that day, or like there's another birth process that takes your whole life where i keep getting bigger but never shove you out.

(i promise to do the version of shoving-out that is letting go. i am roundly sucky at it, but will practice ahead of time.)

oh, sweet baby. you could not be more wonderful.