The crusty-eye has abated. Our doctors must think we're crazy, because we saw them just about daily during the jaundice-crisis of 2003. We received the bill from the hospital related to the introduction of this new young man into the world, and we were astounded. We were eye-poppingly, mind-numbingly knocked out. How, I ask, is this country's population soaring in such a way if every baby costs thousands of dollars to have safely and without complications? Even the blood tests, the little blood tests where they take a tiny droplet of blood from the boy's heel, ring in at a couple hundred bucks.

Make no mistake; I am not complaining about the costs. I would gladly remit everything I own, money, objects, all of it, to ensure my boy's safety and happiness. I'm piping up because we may not feel it every day, but we're very fortunate, well-insured, people. Our neighbor had a baby shower yesterday. As best we can tell, one large extended family lives in the house next door, a one-story affair the type of which you will see rolling down the highway on the pack of a pair of trailer trucks. A pair of grandparents, a pair of parents, a pair of children, and one or two other siblings/aunts/uncles all live in this house. The mother is pregnant with a third child to add to the three and five year-olds who live there now.

I don't know how they will absorb these costs. The reliable, safe care that we sought out, and took advantage of, may well be out of reach for our neighbor. The numbers I see on these hospital statements informing me how much our insurance company has been billed for are astounding. Receiving a bill for this total sum of money could knock a family living on the bubble right off the edge.

Whew. How'd we get there?

Anyhow, this little boy here, he's amazing. Eyes crust-free, and smelling of the sweet baby-scent that I hope clings for years. I hope this boy is a teenager heading to high school sporting a baby-from-the-hospital scent. They should bottle this smell. It's phenomenal. But the young man's eyes are clear, and now they are looking around wildly. He is focusing on sounds now, locking onto the source of something, trying to match in his new brain the sound and its maker. The eyes were blue when he first came to us. Now they are slowly transitioning to a liquid brown, flecked with hints of his now-fading blue. It makes his eyes sparkle, though I'm not certain it isn't me projecting a magical quality to this little, squiming boy.

For the most part, we only see his little eyes at night. His sleep schedule hasn't reverted to the one we use here in the Western World. He is bright-eyed and eager, though quick to cry, starting around ten pm. This has become my special time with Reid. I sit with him while he's staring all around, goggling the corners and the light cast on the wall. He looks right at you, and his expressions range from shock and what may be a grin (or gas) to befuddlement and the gently-shattered expression of a baby about to launch a wail.

People often say to me that there are certain cries that babies use (hungry, dirty diaper, etc). I don't know so much about that with our little unit. He's got a standard cry, which has two outcomes if left unchecked (accelerate by degrees, or abate). But a crying baby who makes one hand into a fist and uses the other hand to jam the first into his mouth is hungry, or possibly a performance artist. And a baby who just made audible bowel noises has a dirty diaper. I'm not reading faces so much as I'm just not a total idiot.

I'm going to try and capture these new faces tonight and let people see the wonder of this boy. Who knows, maybe I'll get lucky and see his eyes in the daylight this evening.