It's a Wonderful World

Cheers and congratulations to the three (or maybe four?) of you!
And dear blog visitor, in the most unlikely case that you may not already know, Bryan and Rebecca will soon be shopping for baby clothes and furniture to get ready for the happy event in September.
It's a wonderful world, indeed.
______

Excerpts from "In a Helpless Baby, the Roots of Our Social Glue " by Natalie Angier
The New York Times

A baby may look helpless. It can’t walk, talk, think symbolically or overhaul the nation’s banking system. Yet as social emulsifiers go, nothing can beat a happily babbling baby.
A baby is born knowing how to work the crowd. A toothless smile here, a musical squeal there, and even hard-nosed cynics grow soft in the head and weak in the knees.
In the view of the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, the extraordinary social skills of an infant are at the heart of what makes us human.
Through its ability to solicit and secure the attentive care not just of its mother but of many others in its sensory purview, a baby promotes many of the behaviors and emotions that we prize in ourselves and that often distinguish us from other animals, including a willingness to share, to cooperate with strangers, to relax one’s guard, uncurl one’s lip and widen one’s pronoun circle beyond the stifling confines of me, myself and mine.
.
Photo location: Bangkok, Thailand