Flow it, show it, dig it out of your salad...

Hair is everywhere. My hair.

Clinging to the couch cushions. Floating and moving along the hardwood floors. Covering the bathtub drain.

It's stuck to Aida's body at bath time and wrapped around her slobbery fingers at play.

The other night, as I finished up making salads for dinner, I noticed a strand running through the red leaf lettuce.

"I saw that," Steve said after I tried quietly to pull it from the plate.

In truth, you'd be hard pressed to find any surface in this house that is 100 percent hair-free. For the past two months, I've been shedding ridiculous amounts -- another whotheheckknewthiswasasideeffectofpregnancy situation.

Turns out, your body holds onto your hair when you're pregnant. So, you don't lose it at the rate of a normal human being.

But hold onto your hats (heh heh) after that baby's born, because you could be bald before you know it. Hair loss is in overdrive.

Poor Aida. She's gonna be so embarrassed by her bald mama.

Pride swells

At some point in the last three weeks, Aida started turning into a real-life baby-baby. She eats more, she sleeps more, she plays more, she babbles more.

I (and my boobs) are just trying to keep up.

She's pulling her feet to her mouth and trying to suck her toes. She's holding her legs to her chest and rocking from side to side. She's happily pushing herself up from her belly and doesn't mind staying tummy-side-down for long periods of time. At night, it seems, she hikes around her crib.

Aida has long, involved conversations with herself on the way to and from sleep. She tastes every toy and every cloth and sucks her fists at every angle possible. She leans forward in the swing now to touch and gum the little toy animals on the tray in front of her. When placed on her back, she keeps her head lifted in a long, deliberate abdominal crunch.

I started "training" her last week to fall asleep in her crib instead of my rocking her to sleep, and she took to it like she'd been waiting for months for me to put her down. What I thought would be a weekend of suckiness and more suckiness, she embraced with the dignity of a champ. A baby champ. Now, she's crying less, sleeping better and generally impressing us with her all-around wonderfulness.

Pride swells.

It swells when she giggles for strangers and friends. It swells when she holds the teething bumble bee between her hands and lifts it to her mouth. It swells when she hangs her head out of the side of the Baby Bjorn on our walks, trying to take in every sight around her.

And when my mom tells me what a great day Aida had while I was at work? Yep, swelling.

"I love her," I tell Steve at night after Aida's fast asleep. "Isn't she cool?"

Steve agrees. She is. And it happens again. I am overtaken. Awash in gratitude and happiness and all things light and airy and fluttery and good. Heartbreakingly, achingly amazed. Heartbreakingly, achingly in love.

Wednesday morning play. 4.5 months.

Aida push-ups

Apologies for my annoying baby-voiced narration, but I must post this. Aida pushed up on her arms for the first time Friday and has been doing it since. Not long ago, putting Aida on her tummy was like putting her in the baby torture chamber. Now, she seems to really like it. And it's a good thing because I have a little case of writer's block at the moment and the other blog post I was working on needs some time to stew. This is from Saturday...the first amazing-miraculous-holy-canoli moment comes around the 54 second mark, in case you're impatient.

Growth spurt

Boy, she's really growing now. And I don't believe my milk supply is keeping up with demand. (Feelings of inadequacy follow.)

Droplets of razz slobber.

Today is Thursday, Thursday, the day before Friday...

It was a good day.

Aida . . .

rolled over from her side to her stomach for the first time.

Laundry

Body image

My back hurts. My shoulders feel as though they've fused with my neck in one hard tangled lump. Tonight, when I tried running, I sensed my bones had shifted.

Oh yeah: They had.

Since Aida was born, my body has become something else. And I'm talking beyond the post-pregnancy pooch, beyond the extra pounds. No, it feels like my once fit-and-tidy body has become a walking experiment in aches and pains. Like with the birth of a baby I added about 10 years to my life.

That's to say nothing about what it's teaching me.

Aida's first fest: Crawfish festival in St. Pete

It's overpriced and all. But she didn't care.

She fought sleep for two hours to be able to enjoy it.

And when she got home, she napped for two hours straight.

Four months old today

Through the night

I awoke for no reason, then reached for my cell phone to read the time.

3:12 a.m.

Wait. 3:12 a.m.?

Aida wasn't awake. She'd been asleep since 6:30 p.m. She always wakes up before now. On a normal night, this might be her second time crying out for help, food, attention, anything.

I lay there for a moment contemplating the situation. Bad thoughts flooded in, most of them colored by what I've read about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

All because it's Carnival time

Our best calculations indicate Aida came into cellular existence sometime around the nine-day stretch that encompassed a Saints Super Bowl win and Mardi Gras 2010.

What can we say? It was the happiest nine days New Orleanians have had since before the You Know Whaticane.

Last Lundi Gras, I spent the night smashing metal trash can lids together like a little kid and dancing with the zeal of an idiot aerobics instructor along with the Noisician Coalition, a glorious white-black-and-red mess of a marching krewe.

Steve laughed at me all night long from behind his red and gold Mardi Gras mask.

My sister, a dedicated member of the Noisician Coalition, had given us access to her costume closet earlier in the evening and invited us join in the night's noise parade. So we did, tromping through the Quarter with crazy, homemade instruments, entering one bar after another to overtake them with the improvised rhythms of a maniac clown krewe before spilling out onto the street again.

It wasn't the first time I'd joined the Noisician Coalition on the parade route, but for some reason it was the funnest -- and it quickly melted into my favorite Mardi Gras day to date, one characterized by great joy, communal mirth, and absolute silliness with family and friends. (At one point, I was playing tambourine with a musician on the Moon Walk, ferchrissakes.)

Which brings me to this Mardi Gras weekend.