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Yesterday, on our way home from Portland, Baby J was sleeping peacefully.

Armed with this information, my father decided to take us all on a jaunt through the countryside, ostensibly to show my brother the country club my parents just joined. Supposedly, it's only six miles away, but it always takes about fifteen years to drive there for some reason. Not sure why. My father claims it only takes ten minutes, but this has never been my experience.

Anyway, on the way back, Baby J woke from his nap. At first, he was pretty happy -- smiling, looking around, being generally funny and cute and fantastic.

And then he started to get mad.

Probably because he was a) bored, or b) pretty hungry after not eating for three hours.

So Freckles and I were sitting in the back, basically troubleshooting ways to possibly make him calmer while we drove along.

"Show him the camera," I told Freckles, which worked for a while. He sees us holding it, and then he wants to investigate it himself. After about thirty seconds, though, this stopped working.

"Pretend to take pictures of him," was my next suggestion, following an experience we'd had in the shopping center once, when Freckles tried to take a picture of him half asleep. The second he saw the camera that time, he started smiling.

So Freckles took a variety of real and imaginary pictures of him with the digital camera.

For some completely weird reason, it worked. He would be actively crying, and Freckles would say, "Baby J! Smile for the camera," pointing it into his face and focusing so that the orange light glowed in the front. Every time Baby J immediately stopped crying and smiled, sometimes just in time for the photo.

Because it was fairly dark outside (late afternoonish) and because Baby J is really pretty fair, he looks totally washed out in most of the pictures. In each one, though, you can see an huge, open, smiling red mouth, complete with new teeth, and grinning, jovial blue eyes shining from his pale face. If you didn't know that he was utterly angry from being enclosed in the car, you'd actually think he was having one of the best days of his life.

I don't know what else to say except that maybe he's going to be a celebrity. Or, at least, one of those sort-of-borderline conceited people (like me) who reflexively smile if they suspect they might be in the corner of a photo taken by a stranger in a restaurant, just in case the stranger ever looks at their pictures and cares.

 *note: from my regular blog, at http://www.plasticsnappythings.blogspot.com/