**Co-Editor's note

Now that Cooper has arrived, I’ll be sharing this space with her – and even though she’s been very busy getting adjusted to her new surroundings and life outside mommy’s tummy, she did want to share a few thoughts. So I’m pleased to introduce…Ms. Cooper Elizabeth Smith!


WELL HELLOOOO WORLD!
Happy to meet you! As Henry mentioned, I’m still getting used to life ex utero, but Henry assures me there are lots of fun things to see and do, and already I’ve met lots of interesting people. I especially like my brother, but he’s starting to bug me a bit – he insists on pointing to and identifying my feet, my hands, my belly, my eyes, my ears…you get the picture. He’s very proud because he can say the words, but from my perspective, I end up just getting poked a lot.

Other than that, life is good. Apparently I’m very cute – it seems to be the one thing everyone agrees on when they first meet me, even if they differ on whether I look more like Daddy or Mommy. I’m also psyched to go shopping with mom…she pretends not to be a girly girl, but I seem to be in an awful lot of pink cutesy outfits.

I DIG CHICKS (a companion piece to my “CHICKS DIG ME” series)

You regular readers know that chicks do indeed dig me (see earlier entries) but I have recently discovered that I dig chicks. Actually there is one particular chick that I am into right now. Her name is Cooper Elizabeth Smith and she is my newly arrived little sister. She officially joined our family at 3:01 PM on May 19th, though she had been living inside mommy’s tummy for several months now. She weighed in at 8 lbs., 8 oz. and measured 21 in. I may be biased but I think she is the cutest newborn I have ever seen.

Here are the things I dig most about Cooper Elizabeth:

• Her soft fuzzy head. She has thick black hair covering her perfect pink head. It is the softest hair I have ever felt, tough mom and dad do not give me much chance to explore it freely…always mumbling something about soft spots, rambunctious 18 month olds, etc.


• She began her life living in a magic room. This room looks pretty normal when you first enter…a bed, a few chairs, a window, you know the usual stuff. Upon closer inspection you see the magic though. The bed can move up and down and backward and forward all with the press of a button. Very cool! You can also press buttons that make nurses magically talk to you even though they aren’t in the room. They usually sound a little annoyed to be buzzed again.


• Jello! Little known fact I think but with babies comes this thing called jello. I arrived to greet my newborn sister for the first time only to see this shimmering wiggling mound of goodness in the aforementioned magic room of my sister’s. It was sitting untouched on mommy’s tray of similarly untouched hospital food. I don’t know how mommy missed this yumminess, but I dug right in. It is slimy, but not too slimy; sweet, but not too sweet, finger food, but messy enough to have fun getting it all over your face and hair. Every time I visited Cooper Elizabeth in her magic room there was a plate of this stuff. I had never heard of this delicious concoction but boy do I know how to ask for it now.


• She is not a girly girl. Once I got the news that we had a girl child in the family I had some apprehension. Was the house going to be filled with sugar and spice and everything nice? Would daddy, Rufus and I have to start being sensitive, putting the toilet seat down and wearing pink? As far as I can tell no. Little Cooper Elizabeth is cute as can be and does tend to wear pink, but she is no girly girl. This girl can burp like, well, like my mommy.


• She takes up a lot of mommy’s time. This may seem to be a funny thing for an older sibling to like about a new baby so let me explain. Mommy has her hands full with Cooper lately. That leaves Daddy to look after me. We two men have had so much fun together. We have gone to museums, to the play rooms at IKEA, to Eastern Market, Lincoln Park, to Congressional Cemetery with Rufus, and shopping at Pentagon City. We play fun games like “Crazy eyez daddy” (see also curb your enthusiasm), WWF Super Slam, and our afternoon “scream-off.” And, like me, my dad really appreciates a good afternoon nap.


• She makes mommy and daddy really happy. Though mommy and daddy both have bags under their eyes right now and I have seen a significant drop in the occurrence of showers by both, I really have never seen them happier.