8 weeks, 3 days
Finally got a smile out of Milky this morning. I mean a proper, genuine, can’t help yourself grin that lit up her whole face. It’s not that she hasn’t smiled at me before, you understand, but I’d always put it down to wind. This one was different – it made the little lines around her eyes crinkle together in a very appealing way. She looked ten years younger all of a sudden, although they may have been partly due to the fact that I let her have nearly five hours uninterrupted sleep.
Anyway, this smile, this big proper smile, it was all down to me. I’ve discovered a little technique and, although scientifically speaking it has to be pointed out that my sample size is too small to have any real validity, so far it has been 100% successful.
Here’s what I did. I smiled at her first. Turned out to be a simple process. Simply twitch the corners of the lips upwards and hold. I accompanied this with something I’ve seen Hairy do with varying degrees of success: I raised my eyebrows, then lowered them, then raised them again. I know it sounds simple, but what a result! Blimey, I thought, she’s going to start crying again. And she did, but it was good crying, if you know what I mean. Happy crying. Fat drops running off her nose and falling on my cheek, both of us still gurning at each other like a couple of simpletons.
Bigs are funny creatures, not like me. When I cry, there’s something wrong. Hungry, tired, need to burp, need to fart, would prefer not to sit in a pool of my own crap. Simple, see? And I have a sliding scale of crying/screaming volume depending on the urgency of my needs. It starts at “painfully loud” and goes right up to “so we’re all agreed a vasectomy is a good idea, yes?” Bigs, though, they’ll cry for some of the same reasons (although they seem to have a much better system to deal with their crap, which hardly seems fair) but they’ll also turn on the waterworks at seemingly random moments. Particularly Milky. Hairy has suggested on occasion that this is due to “hormones”, but I doubt he’ll be suggesting it again for a while after Milky’s comment that abstinence was, all things told, even more effective than a vasectomy. Anyway, he’s hardly one to talk. I’ve seen him filling up when I’m holding his finger and staring up at him. What he doesn’t seem to realise is I’m just waiting for him to pull my finger so I can fart. No sense of humour, some people.