One of my favorite things about being a mother is that I now have eyes for the baby-demographic.
Before Opal was born, babies were certainly adorable in that generic kittens-in-a-calendar sort of way, but I was unable to decipher beyond the first layer of adorable fluff. I was not well enough acquainted with any of them to appreciate any particular character traits or personality bits.
By the time Opal was born, I had only held one other newborn baby--her cousin Max who was born six months earlier--so I certainly came to the table with the wide soup-bowl eyes of a beginner! And in the last six months of Opal's life, since I've been practicing the art of watching a baby, attending to a baby, asking questions and learning the language of a baby, I am able to apply that to the rest of the world. Or, more accurately, the rest of the world seems to have offered up a thousand little darlings for me to speak to in this new-mama way.
The way a new spanish speaker must feel when he suddenly notices the environment to be dripping with gracias and hasta prontos or a budding percussionist who suddenly feels a rhythmic pulsing beat present itself around every corner, this is how I feel about the availability of little beings to practice this new cognizance on.
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