On September 21, Delphine turned six months old. She celebrated by cutting her first tooth, down on her lower front gum, and complaining loudly about it. But when she’s not suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous teething, she likes to giggle. A lot.
Delphine is almost five months old. And in the past few days, she’s started to show her age by spending most or even all of the night in her crib in her own room.
Some mornings, we come in to check on her and she’s already awake, just lying in the crib playing with her hands, watching her mobile, and placidly studying the ceiling. When our heads loom over the edge of the crib, she stares at us for a minute, as if trying to place us, and then, reliably, she smiles in recognition.
It’s the best few minutes of the day.
Unlike us, Baby D. is often at her perkiest first thing in the morning. Here she is doing her best flirty smiling for her dad.
Delphine isn’t exactly talking yet, but she vocalizes plenty, and we like to record her chirps and grumbles. She specializes in the eh-eh, a cute little rhythmic burbling that sounds like the far-off suggestion of a full-fledged wail. Here’s a video of the eh-eh, heading into crying territory.
Apparently, the eh-eh is not original to Delphine. As the New Yorker’s pop-music critic pointed out a few weeks ago, musician The-Dream (yeah, that hyphen’s supposed to be there) uses the eh-eh as his auditory calling card.
Want to hear The-Dream’s slower, mellower version of the eh-eh? It’s in the background at the start of J. Holiday’s R&B ballad “Bed.”
I never before understood how people could take grainy, fuzzy video of their children, no matter how cute, and share it around. Now I know better.
Thanks to grammie for taking the first video!
