Hello, Pushkin

I found Mae's baby book in the drawer the other day and decided to flip through to fill in some blanks. I was doing fine, listing weights at monthly check-ins, dates for first teeth, memories about her first Christmas, and then I got to one that completely stumped me: "I first laughed out loud:......."

That's a big one, isn't it? But I honestly have no idea. What I can tell you is that, at some point, she started laughing, and now she laughs all the time. I can also tell you that it's the single greatest noise on the planet earth.

The other day, Mae was downstairs with my husband playing "upside down" (a thrilling game in which he flips her upside down, then shouts "UPSIDE DOWN," then she histerically laughs her head off, then he flips her right side up, then they do it again) and I just stopped what I was doing and stood there for the longest time, basking in the noise of her laughter. It reminds me of little bells. There's something that pure about it.

Or, at least, it had always seemed that way to me. But then yesterday I got a haircut; a bad, bad haircut. I'm not usually the kind of person who gets upset about hair (it grows back, after all) but this time I couldn't help it. It was much, much shorter than I'd asked for, with way too many layers. I kept saying to the hairdresser "I think that's short enough" and she'd say "Okay, I'm just tidying it up now," and then she'd chop off another three inches. The end result made me look a lot like Harry Potter.

When I got home, I cried over it while nursing Mae. When she heard me sniffling, she stopped and looked up at me with her big, curious eyes. "Oh Mae," I explained, sadly. "A terrible, terrible thing has happened to mummy's hair." Well, didn't the mean-spirited little brat burst out laughing like my suffering was the most hillarious joke of all time. "No. It's not funny," I explained, shaking my head. "It's a terrible thing." She laughed more.

But by the third time she laughed, I couldn't even be mad at her or properly feel sorry for myself anymore. I just like that sound too much. I ended up laughing at her laughter. And in the morning, after I washed all the hairdresser pouffiness out of the bad haircut, I was able to see that it was actually sort of cute, in a whimsical, pixie kind of way. Plus, it's true: it will grow out eventually.

In conclusion, I'm not going to go and say anything crazy, like that I'd get a bad haircut any day just to make my little baby laugh... but, at the very least, it was the silver lining in a bad, bad, bad hairday.