Tara is doing a daily documenting of her girls’ lives for the month of May, and her stories are so sweet that they inspired me to do my own. I don’t think I’ll make it through May since I’ll be traveling for a chunk of it, but we’ll see how far we get.

Abigail is a few days away from her 9-months birthday and is finding more and more of life’s situations funny. Today I put her in her crib, standing up to watch while I, on hands and knees, cleaned up a spill on the carpet. She caused the spill by dragging out the humidifier water tank and then tipping over the whole humidifier. She likes to see how much she can dismantle it, and how wet she can get trying. I don’t know what we’re going to do about the humidifier—it’s great white noise for naps and nighttime, and it keeps the air tolerable in a city where humidity often drops into the single digits. But she can’t keep using it as her personal splash pool.

So she was standing up there, leaning on the railing, queen of all she surveyed while I scrabbled and scrubbed below. I looked up, and as soon as we made eye contact, she dissolved into giggles. I crawled a little to the left to attack another wet spot. More giggles. Back to the right, experimentally. Abigail had to sit down for a moment, she was laughing so hard. I started crawling around the room, then reached up to hug her in the crib. She could hardly breathe for all the guffaws. Imagine! Her, standing, at adult height, while mama crawled around like a baby! Hah! The delicious reversal of status! And of course when my beautiful baby laughed like that, I wanted to keep making her laugh. So I crawled around that tiny, damp bedroom for quite awhile. And I liked it.