An Indulgent and Adoring Description of My Daughter’s Physical Person

I want to take the time now to describe my gorgeous daughter so that when I am 90 I can look at my 63-year-old daughter and somehow remember her two-month-old face. Lily is growing and plumping up at an astonishing rate. She is becoming so fantastically chubby that her arms don’t have the usual four rolls, but five, three on her upper arm and two on each forearm.
Lily's face has filled out so much that due to her cheeks, her head is now more square looking, except for this tiny, dainty chin protruding slightly from the bottom of the square. I am absolutely in love with that chin. Who knew a person could love a chin? Above her chin, tiny and round, like a set-in marble, are these fantastic, pouty lips the color of ruby-red grapefruit-flesh. Lips that would make Angelina Jolie consider collagen injections. Her nose is a baby nose, the type called button, but her eyes—oh, her eyes! When they are open they could light a cathedral. Whenever people we know see her awake they behave as if they have seen something fantastic, like an angel or a shooting star. We still don’t know what color they will end up—Julia still has her heart set on blue—Tiger jokes that they could turn the darkest brown and she would still say that they were “linda ojos azules.” Tiger and I might entertain a moment or two of disappointment if they go brown, but I’ve already fallen in love with one set of brown eyes, I will happily do it again. As for now they are a dark graphite blue with a light grey halo around her pupil.
The first few days of her life I joked that Lily's funny little ears were on up-side-down, as the tops taper and curve off and away, not quite pointed, and the bottom of her lobes are quite round, like the tops of ears usually are. When mom brought up baby pictures of me we realized that those were my baby ears and now I reassure her that they will round out when she gets older. Her hands and feet are all me—people exclaim at her long fingers and toes. Tiger says he is relieved that she got my feet and hands (Aunt Pat calls the their side's hands “farmer hands,” and I once hurt Tiger's feelings by saying he had cute hobbit feet), though an Italian woman in a French class we were taking in Nice once went on and on about the merrits of Tiger's hands, so he shouldn't feel too badly about them.
Most often she reminds me of pictures I’ve seen of Carlynn as a baby, with glimpses of my baby pictures every so often. I think she might have Katie’s nose, but I often fancy she reminds me of my Great Grandma. I don’t know if that means that I think she looks like on old woman or not, perhaps it is the cheeks. Either way, my Great Gram was a beautiful young woman, she looked quite a bit like Drew Berrymore, so it would turn out fine.
Lily's belly protrudes in that fantastic way that babies bellies do, and now when she sits topless in her carseat or I hold her naked over her little potty, she looks like a baby-faced Buddha, all rolly and happy.
Tiger and I are completely in love with her, and constantly say to each other, “look at our beautiful baby. Isn’t she gorgeous?” It is a combination of the purest kind of love and utter fascination that this tiny creture is yours. I’m still in denial sometimes, as if her parents are going to show up any minute and my life will carry on as it always had before. But she is mine. I’m a mama. That is a bit too trippy.
I was talking with Anne and we were agreeing that this whole adult business is startling as our minds often see us as 12 or 13. We have these adult lives with adult responsibilities and every so often we stop and think, can this possibly be me? Aren’t I 12 or something?
I’m so afraid I will forget something beautiful and important about her…like the way I was amazed when I watched her eyes dilate the other day, how I was overcome by the fact that she works. Everything about her works. Or how, in the morning, when I hold her over her little potty she beams up at me adoringly with the most amazing toothless smile, and when I do it at night she cries. How when she poops she curls her tiny sausage toes. I want to remember all that.