Here's a mouthful of teeth that's making me laugh today.

"Roar! I'm a BEAR"

Today we took a long lunch to apply for e-baby's passport. It was a major league pain in the tookus, requiring three separate trips to the passport office and one trip to (gasp! arg! ack!) Wal Mart. Everyone involved was very friendly, which was an unexpected treat, considering I was expecting something along the lines of DMV workers. E-baby has a way of defusing bad moods.

After work, when I picked up e-baby at daycare, her teachers asked me whether I had noticed her "starting to, um, stand, and er, walk, yet?" I said I thought she was VERY close to walking, but hadn't yet, as far as I knew... wait a minute. Why do you ask? "No reason! Just wondering!"

You see, a lot of parents don't want to know if their kid starts walking or talking (or crawling, or any other photogenic milestones) for the first time at daycare. I think they want to have the excitement firsthand, and perhaps they also feel bad that they can't be there to see all those little firsts since the kid is in daycare. These might be the same people who don't want to know whether they're having a boy or a girl.

I can totally understand this. There's a real thrill to seeing your child do something for the first time. But personally, I am an information-hungry person. There's no such thing as TMI in my book. I want to know whether the baby will be a boy or girl, and what s/he will major in in college. And I want to know if she's started walking, even if I wasn't there to see it happen.

Anyway, back to daycare this afternoon. I couldn't help but notice the shifting and hemming and hawing, so I told the teachers that it was OK with me if they told me whether anything was going on with e-baby. They sighed with relief and told me that e-baby walked 3 steps today. Even better, she didn't just walk 3 steps and fall down. She walked 3 steps over to the little boy she likes to play with and then climbed over him.

I still haven't seen her do it, but I'm not worried. She'll do it in front of me soon enough. She's tentative about letting go while standing up, so it'll probably be a week or 2 before she walks confidently, and then thump-swish will give way to pitter-patter.