A face that only a mother could love

Robby makes this scrunchy stink-eye face all the time now. He squints his eyes like he’s staring at the sun, curls his lips up to show off two big front teeth and wrinkles his nose.

It’s truly a face that only a mother could love, and I don’t see any sign of it going away. The face often elicits laughter and varying frequencies of ooh’s and
ah’s from his adoring audience. The stinky face will live on.

Touchdowns and other cool tricks

For the first several months of a baby’s life, they pretty much can’t learn anything. You could show a baby a hundred times to do something like clap, and then when you say in your high-pitched squeaky baby-talk voice “Ok __(name)__, clap!!” the baby would stare at you intently as if he were processing something. He will probably look the other direction, tip his head to the side, raise his hand, crawl away, cry, poop, etc. The only thing the baby is assuredly not going to do is clap. You may even start to question your own IQ, but you should not worry. Soon enough the change will happen and your baby will learn things that you wished you never taught them.

Robby’s picking up new tricks almost daily! Some of the tricks are really cute, like smacking his lips and throwing his hands up when you say “touchdown”. We’ve almost mastered hi five’s and we’ll be slowing introducing the thumbs up. He’s also started sticking his tongue out at people, which when you’re ten months is kind of a cute thing to do. But thanks to Robby, I’ve seen more adult tongues in the past few weeks than I have my whole life. Obviously when a baby sticks his tongue out at you and you’re an adult in the grocery store, you should stick your tongue out back at him! We must encourage this awesome behavior.

Kidding aside, it’s really adorable seeing him learn new things. He gets very excited with the positive feedback his little tricks generate. He has learned to clap on his own now and will break into claps when he hears music. As a musician, this melts my heart. He may not be a baby Einstein, but he’s the smartest little man in my world.