November 18, 2010

Tessa and the Tub: Another Love Story

Tessa is in the big people tub now. This morning she stayed in until her toes wrinkled. She likes to slap her palms against the water and gnaw on her bath toys. She crawls around in there, stands up, hangs onto the shower curtain for dear life, and often slips and falls, surprisingly gracefully and without any tears. I love taking pictures of her in the bath because when her hair is wet she looks like a different baby.

She's going through an Albert Einstein phase with the hair these days (which is far better than the Danny Devito phase from a few months ago), and I'm trying different techniques to "style" her curls. We use Johnson's leave-in conditioner and I comb out her tangles/dreads and scrunch her hair. Today I got her with my blow drier while I was drying my own hair. She loved it. When she's older and doesn't need the tear free formulas, I want to try the
Mixed Chicks products on her.

Speaking of "mixed" babies (I usually say "biracial" because I like sound of it better), Tessa has just about every tee-shirt from this website called
Swirl Syndicate. One shirt that says I'm Swirled (with a chocolate and vanilla ice cream cone), one that says I'm a Little Bit of Everything (with a blender) and one that says Mixed (with a cassette tape). I actually got the first two shirts for her five years before she was born. Nekos and I weren't even married yet, but I saw a Tessa in our future. I want to teach her to be proud of her heritage and to have fun with it, just like Nekos does. Almost everything can be funny, depending on how you look at it.