Day 53

It was Luna's first birthday celebration today.  So there was a big party with all the tiny people and cakes and all the young parents drinking wine and beer and talking about their experiences of the first year of their baby's life.  What a year that is! 

Happy birthday girl

second cousins

You go through all the strangeness and wonder of growing this person inside the woman, and then the trauma of birth, and then you get to take home this new little mewling (quite ugly-looking) creature who is totally helpless, of whom you are pretty scared, about whom you know very little, but with whom you soon fall utterly and deeply and irrevocably in love, and with whom you suffer through colic and teething and getting sick for the first time, and first smiles, and first food, first word, often first step, standing proudly upright like the long line of Homo sapiens sapiens who have gone before.

And suddenly there is this little person standing balancing against the table, eating cake, and looking a lot more like a human being than they did just a year ago.  Such a short time really, but such an enormous rush of development.  This is now a small human being, with desires and dislikes and interests and tastes of her own already. 

And she is your little person, looking a little like Granny Margaret here, or having toes like Uncle Nick there. She is your darling clever little thing, whom you cannot imagine even going for a sleepover at someone else's house, let alone ever breaking your heart or making bad decisions, or telling you that she hates you, or driving a car, or leaving home to go to university, or having babies of her own.  

The first babies to arrive at the party were all girls, all with blue or green eyes and blond hair.  It is surprising how many tow-headed small children there are, and then the hair seems to slowly lose that luminescence, so that by they time they are in their teens it has progressed to a generally mousy brown.  All four of my children looked like Scandinavians when they were little, with white-blond hair, and only Emma still has flaxen hair.  She does lighten her hair but still has pale eyebrows and fair eyelashes, the mark of the true blonde. 

Only about 2% of the entire world population are blond after the age of 18. There are various theories as to why Europeans in particular developed blond hair, and most of them seem to point to men being more attracted to blue-eyed blond-haired women.  So nothing has changed?  " ... a hypothesis was presented by Canadian anthropologist Peter Frost, who claims blond hair evolved very quickly in a specific area at the end of the last ice age by means of sexual selection.  According to Frost, the appearance of blond hair and blue eyes in some northern European women made them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males." - wikipedia

Scientifically speaking, people with light skins and blond hair have low levels of the dark pigment eumelanin.  These people evolved after the last Ice Age in Europe, about 11000 years ago, as a result of fewer daylight hours and therefore less absorption of Vitamin D. 

One of the little blondies at the party.