She Smiles!

I've had a hard time with Frances from the very begining. I've loved her, sure, but I wasn't in love with her, and I certainly didn't like her. I think a lot of the feelings that people associate with PPD are really quite natural, especially when you're all alone with a child. I mean, this unpleasant little stranger came into our lives, turned our lives topsy-turvy, and disrupted our family balance. It's a demanding little person, yelling all the time, expecting everything to be dropped at a moments notice to cater to it's whims. It's strange, while I did go a little loopy after Mary was born, I didn't feel this way about her at all. I loved her and was in love with her from the first second I laid eyes on her.

Anyways, the point is that I fell in love with Frances this weekend. Up to this point she's smiled every once in a while, but they were practice/gassy smiles, not the real thing. This weekend she started smiling for real. Yesterday evening I was sitting on the couch holding her and watching TV. I happened to glance down at her and there she was, gazing up at me with a huge, adorable smile on her face. See?





We spent a lot of time this weekend at the house. We took about 700 nails out of the walls, our next task is to putty the holes and pick out paint. We also put together the dining room table and chairs, as well as a china cabinet for all my mothers china and crystal that she brought. We have a real dining room table! We have a dining room! The space in that house makes me giddy...compared to the place in Edmonton it's a mansion.



Mary "helped" a lot with the construction of the china cabinet. It took 6 hours to put the bloody thing together. I puttered around doing dishes in the dishwasher (we have a dishwasher!!) and pulling nails while Ian laboured away at the cabinet. It looks great now that it's finished and I can't wait to fill it with stuff.



It was awfully hard to come back to the apartment last night. I love our house so much, even with all the work that it needs, I wish we could just live there already. It'll be worth the wait though, once we get the place painted it's going to be beautiful. We did make it home though, and Frances and I slept like babies.