A Big Baby Step Forward

The day began like any other day. Steve was in the kitchen whipping up julienne vegetables with his special home made dressing. Jane was telecommuting to Marin County, CA and arguing via email about DVD decisions, and who’s fault is it really—if you want to point a finger—that the book doesn’t match the video? You get the picture.

None of this matters at all, because our pre-court date is tomorrow! And that meant that today—unbeknownst to us—was passport photo day for our little dumpling. How real this is all becoming.

After our morning visit, we came home for a quick lunch, and just as we were telling each other how good a nap was going to be, the phone rang. Dina. A complete surprise. “Be downstairs to meet a cab at 2:30. Don’t be late. It’s passport photo time. And bring photos of your visits here with Jem, too, to prepare for your court appearance.”

“Holy cow!” we said. All our photos are in our computer and we don’t have a disk to burn them to.

So Steve, in moment of heroic fatherhood, dashed across the street to a cell phone store where he started waving an E.R. DVD (care of Gigi and John) and his money in the air, trying to describe with his hands a photo CD. Not an easy charade. Luckily someone responded before they forcibly removed him for disorderly conduct.

Twenty minutes later, as Jane was finalizing a photo file on the computer’s desktop, Steve burst into room, sweating and triumphant, waving the disk in the air. What a happy couple they were, for a few seconds, believing that the disk would work.

Alas. It was unreadable.

So they packed up the computer and brought it with them, with the hope that someone would be able to download their precious digital library of Jem.

First stop: the babyhouse. We entered like thieves and snatched Jem from her afternoon nap. Being Jem, she was completely cool about the whole thing. She sat quietly through the hot, bumpy cab ride (there are no baby seats here), while Jane protected her neck and head from short stops and fancy, jarring Kazakh-style driving.

Next stop: a quick photo franchise. Jem sits on Jane’s lap to have her photo taken. Jane is instructed, repeatedly to get her hands out of the photo, to move Jem to the side of her lap, to hold her further down, and further still, until it seems that the photographer is expecting Jem to sit there on her own and respond to the word “cheese.” All for a tight head shot, for which she could have been held at the arm pits.

After a surprising photo shop session, Jem’s wonderful spikey ‘doo was trimmed down to a crew cut that the Navy would have been proud of. Yuck. Not our Jemmy. But for a passport, we kept our mouths shut.

The same technician printed out our greatest hits gallery.

After kissing Jem and returning her to the Babyhouse’s silent roomful of napping babies, we got back in the cab—Mission Complete—wondering what adventures lay ahead and hoping we’d be prepared for them.

The End.