Houses and a White Fake Fur Cap

Today we searched for open houses. We-we sat proudly and joyfully in her car seat happy about spending time away from the apartment, despite the rain, gray sky and cold temperature. We drove around and found our first open house quickly, it was awful and ONLY $474,000. The second house was strange and a better form of awful, it was reduced from $780,000 to $650,000: a black marble-walled room in the basement with a bidet. Why?

We drove back to our current house of interest still "offered" at $599,000.
The baby slept, cooed, and TALKED. Juliette speaks, not clearly but she makes sounds that are like words. She smiles sweetly and intelligently, like she actually knows what she is smiling about. Smiling intelligently and words, life is good.

A bottle of formula in the car, on the run.
Then home, warm and dry.
Down for a late-afternoon nap after much whining and half-crying on the phone with Grandmother Geraldine.
Up! Awake and jumping on the bed, another bottle of milk, more sleep.
Lifted up from our bed and placed with care into her crib.
Much later the sleep-sack is slipped on and zipped closed.

Good-night sweet girl. There is just one more day in 2007, soon we will re-live the days leading up to your birth on February 19th. I will always have something to look forward to after Christimas and the New Year.
Oh! The magical, mysterious, feeling that filled the day you were born.
I love, love, love that day and every day after that.
The magic of those early days, a thin layer of frost covered everything when you were born.
I changed forever when you were born.
That cold, ice, dark winter day is the best day I know.
The magic has not stopped as the world quickly changed from the winter cold day you were born, to the sunny, warm spring day you came home to us, to hot summer when you slept all day for weeks and weeks, to fall when you started to laugh out loud, and now winter cold and gray when you speak to us.
Darling girl.