Tri Nguyen

Here’s a photograph of Sophie from end of January. Why she’s crying, I forget. What’s left are her two tears.

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So much depends on a cup of coffee, enjoyed in a moment of quiet intent, a moment as good as a comma or semicolon. My espresso machine, which had always grumbled and hissed, developed a leak in her old age. To handle the drip, drip, drip I employed towels, hand pumps and trays just as I deployed buckets everywhere in our last apartment during a downpour. A hassle, but I’d never replace her with a model more stylish. I like to baby her; she still makes a great cup.

My kitchen is almost never this quiet. It’s normally a whirling choreography of scrubbing, opening and shutting, loading and unloading. The microwave chimes and keeps chiming. Little Sophie runs too quickly and suddenly meets the floor; she turns to catch her daddy’s eye a moment before bursting into crocodile tears.

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We’d been cruising south toward Tacoma. Sophie was awake in her car seat but was strangely quiet. I turned around and—whoa! “Pull over! Pull over!” We stopped. Luna got to Sophie first. I grabbed the camera. Cars hurtled behind my back at highway speed.

[fa:p:id=166540782,j=r,s=s,l=p] Sophie’s lips and hands were a red, smeary mess! We’d given her a tube of lipstick to play with. Smart, huh? Well, the “active ingredient” was so far down that tube, I figured that she’d never get to it. How wrong I was. Get to it she did, maybe by twisting the tube.

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[tags]sophie,birthday,zoo[/tags] Sophie's one today. We regaled her this morning with "Happy Birthday!" as she sat up in bed and smiled like a scamp. She was amiable at breakfast, too, a big surprise to me because she gets fussy at the sight of solids these days (to get her to eat, Luna and I have resorted to singing and cavorting; believe me, neither of us can hold a tune).

[fa:p:id=166537288,j=l,s=s,l=p] She's in love with a cracker, a big, flat, rectangular thing studded with sesame seeds, fennel seeds and parmesan cheese. Sophie nibbled one with me, in bed, as we watched Mexico trounce the Iranian team 3--1 at the World Cup. Afterwards I carefully gathered cracker crumbs from the comforter. Sophie snuggled up to me and drifted off to sleep. (She's still sleeping, flat on her back in a powder blue two-piece, lavender socks, and a noup-noup in her mouth.)

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I'm sick again. I'm weak, congested and sneezy; a Theraflu cocktail sounds delicious right about now. This upper-respiratory crap has hit me twice already. This third time had better be the last. What a terrible winter it's been.

Sophie's just getting over a week-long bout of diarrhea (her first); truly adorable runny nostrils; and one feverish, bawling, sleepless night. I dispensed 80mg of liquid Tylenol through an oral syringe, bringing Sophie's temperature down. Sophie looked cute licking the cherry-flavored stuff off her lips. We've burned through her diapers. My hands feel like alligator skin for all the hand-washing that I do. Her doctor saw her Monday; her advice matching what I had gleaned already from baby books. At least I know that Sophie now weighs 15 pounds, 8 ounces.

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So, on a whim, I poked my index finger into the little one's maw. I felt a mineral hardness on her lower mandible. Teeth! Or, a tooth! It was the bite of an erupting incisor. When I told Luna, she stopped just short of jumping for joy. For Luna the tooth explained everything: Sophie's recently attenuated appetite, her bout of diarrhea (and yes, Luna had me consult the "Diarrhea" entry in the baby manual).

In a few years we may have to pull that tooth (bound perhaps by a thread of floss to a doorknob). Yes, I will be sad.

I met Luna yesterday after work. She suggested we check out the happy hour at Palamino. She had a single drink, a blended margarita. It was her first drink since the beginning of her pregnancy, oh, 15 or 16 months ago. She was dizzy before it was half done. We got home and a few minutes later, I found her puking it all out.