... and then she smiled

This morning, in the groggy cold darkness, a baby started fussing. An exhausted daddy reluctantly stumbled out of bed and took his child to the changing table. Opening the diaper, the daddy discovered unusually copious amounts of poop curds, those nasty little milky remains that cling tenaciously to the baby's skin like burs on the socks of a child running through a grassy field in the summer. Patiently wiping them away, the daddy's attention was suddenly diverted to the baby's other end, where white spit-up came flowing out of the baby's mouth. Further warning bells sounded in daddy's head with the realization that the baby, seizing the opportunity afforded by her father's distraction, had taken delivered a strategically-timed blow back down below, where a now-open diaper failed to offer much protection against the wet trickle that flowed down the baby's side, across her warm fleece sleep sack, and onto the fabric of the changing pad below. Once the now-harried daddy attended to this emergency and began to prepare for the "diaper swap," the baby launched the one final salvo, sending forth a fresh wave of liquidy poo. The daddy would have slapped the palm of his hand on his forehead if his hands weren't already engaged in the handling of diapers and cloth wipes.

Tired, bleary-eyed, and frustrated, the daddy completed the operation and fastened the final snaps on his daughter's clothes. His feet were cold from standing on the hardwood floors; his back ached from cradling his baby in his arms and from hunching over changing tables; his head throbbed from being awoken in the middle of a sleep cycle. And then she smiled, and the daddy's heart did, too.