Yes, his head looks a little misshapen. But I assure you it is not. Here we have the closest thing to a smile captured on film to date. There have been bigger and more convincing smiles, but they come without warning and not in response to any stimuli that anyone can figure out. Right now the smile seems to be due to the supine positioning, the yellow suit with trucks and animals, or the bright light being flashed in his eyes.

However, what begins with a placid child can quickly go sour. Trains and animals on your suit can only go so far before the agony of not being picked up gets to a guy. When this face is made, we have just seconds to head off the mild whimpering that is the worst Max has to offer. He is an embarassingly easy baby, really.

The emotional roller coaster of being two months old can be exhausting.

This looks like a sleeping child with six chins and no neck, but what it is is a miracle: Max is asleep without being held by a person. Instead, the vibrating bouncy chair is enough for him. Our glee is only slightly mitigated by our sense of being insulted - how would you feel if your life partner decided that the Magic Fingers at the Motel Six was all she needed? - but this is a life-changing developmental step.

Although, I suppose all developmental steps are life-changing, which is why they get the adjective, "developmental."

Before this, dinner for Leah and me was a three handed activity, and all foods had to be assessed for the degree of trouble they would cause if dropped onto Max's face. Soup, no; rock candy, no; blowfish sushi, no; cut up celery, ok. This is no way to eat.

It is also possible that the chair had nothing to do with it, and that Max's new duck suit is the reason for his good sleeping. Either way, we'll take it.

No, we are not trying to kill him for the sake of a few pictures. He needs what we in the business call "tummy time," or he'll never properly learn about panic and frustration. Here we see Max in the middle of moving his head from facing one way, and hating it, to facing the other way, and also hating it. Being on his tummy is, for Max, a time when he cannot see anything, respond easily to noises, or feel sure that he will not run out of energy and sink face down into the play mat. It must be awful. Yet it is in a book, so we persist.

Stone-faced, Max enjoys a brightly colored ball. I wonder, actually, why baby entertainers need to be in fun shapes - balls, clowns, animals. Babies don't know what things are. A nice plush diving knife, say, or a distributor cap, as long as it was filled with bells or crinkly stuff, would be just as entrancing.



From this angle, Max is smiling. However, I can tell you that this picture is from yesterday, and, in a Fathers' Day Moment so nice that it must be false (but no, it's true) Max began smiling in earnest today. His smiles are big, face-dominating events that, sadly, are as often directed at the reading lamp or dresser as at Leah or me. We are choosing to look at this development in a sort of cosmically detached kind of way: who among us ever truly smiles at another person. Aren't we all just smiling for ourselves? Among 8-week olds, this is surely the case.

As you have no doubt noticed, summer is here and has brought with it the same stupid hot weather as last year. So Max goes naked. We don't know if he gets too hot, but we do, and we read something about how overheating puts babies at some sort of risk of something. The diaper-only pose sheds light on why babies do so much eating and yelling: they are almost entirely stomachs and heads.

I can't get enough of these sleeping pictures. Humor me.

This is how we spend most of our time when Max is not eating and sleeping: watching him sit on our shoulders, looking surprised. He is mesmerized by shadows and lamps and glare off the hardwood floors. We are looking forward to the day when our own faces give him this much to look at.

Tonight was the first night that Max sported real pants. Momentous.