For as good a baby as she was, the one thing Kallie absolutely hated was to have her diaper changed. The only time she screamed was then, and we could never get her to calm down until it was all taken care of. Kit suggested that maybe she didn’t like how things felt when she didn’t have any underwear on, and while it probably shouldn’t have made us laugh, we all did anyway. We could never get her to settle down, so Alice and I started having arguments over who was going to change her. Despite that, though, she was pretty much the perfect baby, so we couldn’t really complain.

My parents and Howie spoiled her absolutely rotten, not that Alice ad I didn’t do that anyway. Our friends did it too, but somehow my family was even worse. My mother went insane buying her little matching outfits, although I told her that it was perfectly fine not to. My dad bought her so many toys I was pretty sure we weren’t going to have an inch of floor space left in the entire house. He wanted to convert part of the basement into a playroom for her, but I finally got him to see reason, with a lot of difficulty. My mom wanted to show Kallie off to all her friends, but I wouldn’t let her take her back to Orange County so soon.

Howie loved her too, and would always come over and ask to feed her or hang out with her. He took her for walks in her stroller when he came to visit, and she started to recognize his voice pretty fast. She adored him like she did everyone else, but she’d make special sounds for him when he came over. It was really cute.

Lenore adored her too. It was kinda hard not to, but Lenore went a little overboard. She bought the poor child more toys than even my parents did, and they bought more than any sane person should. Lenore would also baby talk her, loudly, so much so that Alice started to worry about potential hearing problems. “She never acted this way around my brother and sisters’ kids,” Alice muttered once when her mom was over, cuddling Kallie and cooing at her in baby talk for the hundredth time. “I think she realizes that she’s getting old, so she’s finally acting like a grandma.”