Day 52: What's in a smile?

He did it. He really did it. A smile. Well, it was a baby smile. All mis-shapen, crooked and beautiful. Atom has officially moved from random sleep smiles to what appears to be purposeful goodness.

You might say "But isn't he in the mimic stage? The stage where he might try to mimic your facial expressions." Yes, you are right, he is in the mimic stage. The stage where he enjoys doing more than just stare dead eyed at you until you feel the urge to give him all your money. I am not trying to minimize how cool this stage is but BAM! He entered the stage and kept going right into smiles. A feat few zombies walking around New York City seem to have mastered themselves.

I have to give my wife credit because she seems to bring the most out of Atom and of course he can't seem to smile enough around her. In fact, everyone smiles around her so I didn't put much into this new trick until he turned that gummy mug on me. Mona Lisa looks quite Munch-ish compared to him when he lets it loose. It is hard to describe the feeling when your child smiles at you for the first time. Your lungs expand with a sudden burst of oxygen, your heart squeezes an extra beat into your normal rhythm and time slows to a few frames a second in effort to capture the image into your memory. I feel lucky to have been the beneficiary of his smile and hope many more people feel that way over the course of his life.

Not only does he have a smile that could sell smog to an Angeleno but this means he is learning muscle control. He is making the connection between feelings and how to physically express them. He is making his first attempts at communication. He is looking at me and saying "You make me happy". Of course another explanation is he is looking at me sand saying "Do you smell that?"