Let There Be No Illusions

Meliya has her moments...

Meliya is adorable.  I think she is so cute, especially when she is stretching out her little arms and legs right after waking up and being unwrapped from her swaddling blanket.  She's cute when she has finished eating and I'm burping her, and she's half-asleep but still looking around for something to suck on.  She's cute when she has her 15 minutes of alert time right before sleeping, when her eyes are wide open and she's looking curiously at all the new things around her.

But, let there be no illusions.  Meliya has moments of extreme un-cuteness.  Incredibly, unmistakably, downright un-cuteness.  Parenting has been a blast so far, but maybe about once a day or so I am dealing with my daughter when she looks a lot like she does in the picture above.  Meliya... has got a strong pair of lungs.  This girl can really cry.  She's not a screamer, so it's not high-pitched.  But she can be quite loud.  And quite persistent.  And quite irrational.

Sometimes she works herself into such a frenzy by crying that I'm sure that she's already forgotten the original reason why she started crying in the first place.  Yes, her diaper needed changing, so she cried out.  But, even after I've changed her diaper... she keeps crying!  It takes me 5 more minutes of speaking very calmly (and exercising a lot of patience) to convince my daughter that, if she would just stop crying and take notice for a second, she'd realize that she's got a fresh diaper on now.  It's hard to talk rationally to someone who is yelling in your face.  I can hardly get a word in.

But, for all those moments of un-cuteness, I'm pretty sure that Meliya's cuteness prevails.  The ratio of un-cute to cute is pretty well reflected by the number of un-cute pictures we've posted so far (1) compared with the number of cute pictures we've posted (all the others).  Nonetheless, I needed to make sure that the world got a balanced perspective.  Being Meliya's parents... has its moments.