Day 238

Bryan and Clara.

Even though this image is not sharp, it is priceless because the tiny baby is echoing the dad's smile!  She is only 4 days old, the sweetest, most newly-hatched human being I know. 

Babies are so utterly useless that it's lucky they enchant us so with their sweet looks, enticing us to love them and care for them.  They can't really do anything much for quite a while.  Funny that human babies are so helpless amongst all the mammals.  We take ages to grow that big brain in that big head.   But there she is, just lying there fast asleep, and I instantly fall in love with her, even though I am only an honorary great-aunt, there is no blood relation here.  What power.

I was careful to pay a lot of attention to the dear little big brother, who is all of two and a third, and has now to contend with a little sister who will, through no fault of her own, divert a lot of his previously undiluted attention away from him, and will therefore be somewhat resented for a while.

I was the youngest of three children, and a laat-lammetjie, which means that I came along a lot later than the other two.  So I never had to deal with any of that sibling jealousy myself, and was loved and adored by everyone in my family just because it was such a long time since there had been a baby in the house.

Youngest children are the luckiest, I think, because mostly your siblings love you or tolerate you and also you are kind of left to your own devices because your parents are tired of raising children, they've used the others as guinea-pigs and so can't be so bothered with all the rules and strictness.  They just love you and let you get on with it.

This is a picture my mother took of Emma when Jess was about to be born, while I was in labour in the hospital, in fact.  I think it is a perfect image of how it feels for the older sibling.

So, no self-portrait tonight, because it was a long journey out there to see the newborn Clara and her family and it is late late, past pumpkin-time! 

So, a portrait of Clara which I took with my new "nifty-fifty" lens, as Tim calls it.  Serenity.

New-born babies resemble one another a lot.  You can't really see what they are going to look like when they are older.  When Jess was born she was enormous and rolypoly fat, and looked like her paternal grandfather, who was not the most handsome man!  And Nicholas was this long skinny thing and looked like a puppy which still needed to grow into its skin.  Emma was so blonde that she seemed bald until she was about six months old, and when Matthew was a newborn, he had these enormous eyes which took up most of his face.