Dear Kate,

On Thursday, you were two months old. You celebrated this milestone with a stroller tour of Old Town Albuquerque, accompanied by myself and your great-grandmother, Mimi, who came all the way from Mississippi to meet you. It was a nice day out, and we walked around to all the shops and had lunch downtown. As the day wore on, I kept expecting you to get tired and start crying. By the time we headed home, I was tired enough to feel cranky. But you were angelic, sleeping soundly in your car seat, the perfect Hallmark greeting card baby.

I tell you this story not to nominate you for Baby of the Year, but to illustrate the following point: As the second month of your life draws to a close and the third begins, I officially admit that I have no idea what you're going to do from moment to moment, much less day to day. Motherhood, I am finding out, is one giant guessing game. And you just love to keep things interesting. Because you see, a few days before your performance in "Kate Sleeps Through a Long and Tiring Excursion" you treated us to the world debut of "Kate Screams for an Hour-and-a-Half for No Apparent Reason on a Random Sunday Evening." It was epic, the way you screamed, evoking such tragedy and heartbreak. Bravo. Really. You were stunning. At least, your daddy and I were certainly stunned. I was also considerably freaked out, because the next morning, Dan was leaving for a business trip. It occurred to me that if you chose that exact week to start giving lots of those kinds of performances, I might never regain my mind enough to speak in coherent sentences again. So I braced for the worst, convinced that Dan would come home on Wednesday to find you still shrieking and me in some sort of catatonic state of shock.

Instead, you spent the whole 48 hours that your daddy was gone being so unbelievably cute that I was terribly sorry he wasn't there to see it. On top of that, you slept for seven whole hours one night, which meant that I got the longest stretch of sleep I've had since your birth. You haven't done it again since, but that, too, fits in with my new theory that mothering you is going to be a lot like playing charades. In the dark. Maybe when you start talking we'll be able to work out a more reliable system for communication, but in the meantime, I think I'm just going to have to roll with it and know that some days will be good, and some will just be hard, and there may not be any good reason for that.

This is not going to be easy for me, because if I love anything in this life, it is order. I love to know what to expect. I love to know why I should expect it. I am the kind of person who makes little lists of things to do every day and takes great joy in checking them off, one by one. Thus, it makes me feel totally incompetent that when it comes to you, my tidy little systems of discerning patterns and planning ahead are sometimes just completely useless. I think you know this one some level, and you are laughing a maniacal little baby laugh at night in your crib. Speaking of which, here's a picture of you the morning after your seven-hour sleep stretch. I came in to your room to find that you had managed to scoot yourself from the middle of your crib to the far side in spite of the fact that you were swaddled. You were also apparently quite proud of your little Houdini imitation, because you were laying there grinning.

This has certainly been the month when you've turned on the smiles, and when you smile that open-mouthed gummy smile of yours, it makes up for every minute of fussing you might do at any other point in the day. Your daddy and I frequently stop whatever we're doing so that we can look when you start smiling, and we'll do pretty much any ridiculous thing to get you to keep smiling once you start. And then I have to go get out the camera. It's a vicious cycle.

I think the smiling is part of the overall increase in your awareness of the world around you. Every day, it seems that you become captivated by some new object in the house and want to spend long stretches of time staring at it. For a couple of days, you were fascinated by the book shelves in the living room. I was all excited, thinking you were naturally drawn to the great works of literature on the shelves. But the next day, you stared with equal rapture at the dangling teddy bears on your swing, which was a setback for my plan to have you reading the classics by age three.

Since you like to look around a lot right now, Dan and I decided that it might be a good time to learn to use the Baby Bjorn, a hilarious looking harness that basically turns a baby into a fashion accessory to be worn on the body. Contrary to what your expression in this photo would indicate, you actually do like it, and you ride around the the house with me a few times a day while I do little tasks, and you turn your head from side to side, scouting for new things to stare at.

But by far the thing you love more than life itself this month is your lambi. Lambis are these little sheepskin mats for babies, and when the Rice kids were little, we all had one. My mom has pictures of all of us as babies on these things, and when you were born, she ordered you one. For a while, you didn't seem to take too much notice of what surface we laid you on, but in the last couple of weeks, you have developed a real preference for the lambi, and you'll lay there rubbing your face on it and grabbing big fistfulls of it in your hands. I'm thinking we're going to need a backup so that the world does not come to an end if this one ever needs to be washed.

Not that the laundry gets done in a timely fashion around here lately. I think you know by now who is to blame for that. But I probably need the bursts of chaos and unpredictability you've brought into my world. Left to my own devices, I'd very likely enter into some early state of elderliness, sitting on the porch with an afghan on my knees, reading a book and drinking tea, and start my golden years at the ripe old age of 35. I would make a great old lady, because that's the kind of thing I absolutely love to do. For now though, I'm finding that waking up every day and finding out what is going on with you is much more fun than anything I would come up with on my own, even if I never know what to expect. I hope you are having fun, too.

Love,
Mommy