noiseface

The general guideline seems to be that I'll post a picture of him if I don't get anything else that day, even if I left the ISO set too high to be able to rescue the shadowy patches. He was getting a bit blankfaced by the time this was taken but had been babbling reasonably happily for a few minutes beforehand using his newfound ability to occasionally slightly control his diaphragm, larynx, tongue and lips in vague concert. Though still an exceedingly long way from comprehensible utterances it seems to please him somewhat to repeat whatever sounds he achieves back at him, albeit necessarily deeper. Once or twice this call-and-response thing has worked when attempting to stop him crying for no discernible reason, when he forgets to keep crying and starts trying to make non-wailing noises, though often with his face intermittently lapsing back into a wibbly-lipped frown mid-phoneme.

I haven't remembered to look at any other babies' eyebrows to check but it looks like he might be at risk of developing the same sort of eyebrows I had as a child which would occasionally result in "have you shaved off half of each eyebrow?" sorts of questions, even from my mother and sister. They weren't particularly light-coloured but were quite thin and fine and relatively invisible in some lighting conditions, though as I spent a lot of the time frowning as a youngster their absence didn't particularly affect peoples' ability to make out my expression. Fortunately my old-man's-eyebrows function seems to have activated much sooner than it did in my father, who didn't start developing wiry eyebrows until he was well past forty. It is certainly to be hoped that the wingpiglet will inherit his eyebrows from my side of the family rather than Nicky's; whilst her father is only five months older than mine his baldness has included his eyebrows to the extent that he has only a few hairs remaining on each side whereas my father's Healyness is still increasing.