The days seem to be falling behind us rapidly as we watch Gabi get bigger, stronger, and more active. Here she spends an evening playing on her tummy-time mat, exploring a stuffed dragonfly and a rattle-teether. That evening she spent almost an hour enthralled by the activity while listening to Andy McKee’s Art of Motion–she seems to have a thing for acoustic guitars and I really ought to re-string mine.

Nearly every morning, we are awakened by her holding board meetings with the stuffed animals in her crib, issuing performance reviews to a lazy hippo or the giraffe that missed monthly projections. She is a hard taskmaster like her mother, fair yet stern. Overall, she is a happy baby who spends more time giggling and laughing than crying or fussing but at times she appears to be concentrating hard on a particular problem furrowing her brow much like I do as she stares something down, like her stuffed frog, trying her best to get a handle on where it is coming from. She does much the same when I take her on walks with the dog, her head is on a swivel trying her best to take it all in and not missed a single bird chirp or sigh of the breeze among the reeds by the stream. There is a magic in those moments quietly being with her as she examines and catalogs the world about her.