and joy.

in the past few days i have had the pleasure of opening e-mail only to find pictures of babies whom i love and never get to see.

my goddess son's 4th birthday (wearing what inexplicably has got to be a vintage run dmc shirt?) along with his nearly two year old sister who is a pistol and a half. i don't know where i this comes from, but i have the distinct vision that she is the kind of child you'd WANT to take on a foreign vacation to a strange land.

and a photo montage of a month in the life of a delightful little girl baby way over in india whom i probably will never see as a delightful little girl baby but rather will (if i am incredibly lucky) encounter as a sassy preschooler type.

they are precious and adorable and sorely missed by me.

there is something special about your nearest and dearest having babies after your babies have long been non-babies.

i imagine it's a lot like being a grandparent. the want to fawn and spoil and offer WAY too much crappy advice.

every child is a blessing.

every. single. one.

and it brings me joy to know that those babies are out there being raised by awesome women and their awesome partners. it brings hope and joy to an otherwise can be looked at as dismal world. but with babies in the world nothing can be that dismal.

anyhow, i would love to share these babies with you but instead you get the picture above.

now, i don't really know what's going on in this picture. i can surmise, but we are talking about the boybarians here, so i've learned that anything is possible. best just let the picture speak for itself.

i can say this is what happens when you let them use the camera "for five minutes, with the strap around your wrist only, and not a minute longer!", YOUR camera, that you NEVER let them use because the last one turned into THEIR camera and then got lost.

which is a shame because they had a ton of fun with that camera but there is no way your little pink camera is going the way of the other one so five minutes and that's it!

but, five minutes was obviously plenty to mess around with as you can see from the picture above.

which, if you look pretty closely, brings its own measure of joy.

x.