Ah, Amor, Amor! ...sigh...

You know the feeling, or I'm sure you remember it: total infatuation. It's wonderful and wonderfully awful at the same time. You can't stand being apart from The One. You think about them all the time when you're not together. You look at pictures of them and it makes you feel both happy to gaze at their lovely face, and heartsick because they are not with you and all you have is a crummy photo. You wait impatiently for your next meeting. When you're alone, you sigh a lot and gaze off into space.

That describes me to a T ever since my granddaughter was born a little over a year ago. When I see Lily, words like snookums and punkin enter my vocabulary. I call her little one, baby doll, baby girl, sweetheart, snookie-wookums, punkin-roo, cutie pie, Lily Pilly -- they just roll right off my tongue. I'm not an overly demonstrative person and use very few endearments even with my husband who, although I love him dearly, is only once in a while called anything other than his name. In fact I've been accused of never giving anything away, but if Lily is in the room with me my whole world turns into a "precious moment" and the pet names and superlatives begin to fly out of my mouth. What is it about babies anyway that they can get under your skin to the point where you forget yourself and become a love-smitten fool speaking words dripping with honey? Ain't it great?

Lily with Lily's Mom, my daughter, Emily - another person who made my world precious.