One Month

Yesterday was Athena's one month birthday! She keeps getting bigger and stronger, lifting her head up and spending more and more time looking around her world. She's been especially interested in faces and stares intently at the people who hold her, and I think we're ready to officially announce that she has also started to smile. It's hard to say when her first REAL smile was, since she's given us some great "gas smiles" since pretty soon after she was born, but Nanny and Papa were here visiting last week and on their last morning here (Sept 11) she gave Papa a pretty good grin. This morning she smiled at her big sister, too. As Papa put it when Mazie reached this milestone, we are now transitioning from the binary world of "unhappy/not unhappy" to a more nuanced range of emotions.

A note about Athena's name.... As many of you know, Caleb and I actually came up with the idea of naming one of our future daughters Athena during a road trip from North Carolina to Colorado years and years ago -- possibly as long ago as 2003, before we were married. It was our leading girl's name through about 8 months of our pregnancy with Mazie. In the end, "Mazie James" edged out "Athena Lee" for daughter #1 for a couple of reasons. Besides just liking the way the former sounded, and its sort of Southern flavor for our Carolina girl, we had some concerns about Athena being too "big" of a name for a little girl, and we couldn't think of any good nicknames we could use. This time around, we came up with the idea of using "Tea" (pronounced Tay-uh) as a nickname -- it's a name we liked a lot by itself, and even though it wasn't an obvious diminutive for Athena, we thought it worked well enough. Well, after one month, the funny thing is that we have pretty much abandoned Tea altogether -- she is Athena. It does still feel like a big name, but it also fits her well. (She even has gray-ish eyes for now, like a lot of babies -- it's looking like they might eventually go in a bluish direction.) And we have also come up with a few other nicknames for her... Mazie calls her "Bobblehead," "Aflina" (not a nickname but a mispronunciation), or, even better, "Aflina Lee Di'i'son" (the "K" sound is also tricky for her and ends up getting dropped from the middle of words). Her cousin Crosby calls her "Rafina." Less creatively, we've been using "Thena" a bit, and the other day I found myself calling her "Teeny Thenes." So we'll see how it evolves....