"She's the best baby ever!"

We went to Pittsburgh this weekend so that Abby could attend a friend's baby shower. Margaret and I tagged along since we didn't have anything better to do. It turns out that Margaret made quite an impression on Joe and Mike, our P'burgh friends at whose place we stayed. "She's the best baby ever!" they kept saying. A positive impression? Yep. A misleading impression? Perhaps, but we've also decided that, for no discernable reason, we have a pretty happy, sociable and well-behaved kid. On our way home, Abby and I kept talking about how Margaret had been a "perfect little trooper." But the best baby ever? Well, I wouldn't go quite THAT far, since Mike and Joe clearly experienced a long period of calm between many little (and bigger) storms. But I am pretty happy with our little experiment so far.

To begin with, the drive to P'burgh on Saturday was as good as a long drive could be. Margaret slept for 3 hours of the 4 hour drive and spent her time awake giggling at me rather than fussing. When we left DC, it was a beautiful sunny day, but as befits a visit to P'burgh, the sky got cloudy and it started spitting snow on us shortly after we crossed into Pennsylvania. In fact, it was cold with gray skies and flurries for the rest of the weekend, and it didn't clear up until we got near the Pennsylvania-Maryland border on the way home. But you know what? It wouldn't be P'burgh without gloomy weather and snow.

A visit to P'burgh also wouldn't be complete without a trip to the Strip district and a stop at our favorite P'burgh store, the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company. One of my Italian colleagues used to say that you can get things at Penn Mac that you can't get anywhere else outside of Italy, like Italian sea salt with bizarre English descriptions of the contents (someone was using a strange Italian-English dictionary when making the packaging.) While Abby and Joe went to the baby shower, Mike and I took Margaret down to the Strip to buy olive oil and other stuff at Penn Mac. The Strip is crowded on Saturday, full of the type of people that make P'burgh a place to love - friendly without a hint of pretension - and hate - overweight, big hair, and so on. I carried Margaret around in the Baby Bjorn, and Mike kept remarking about how many people grinned at her as we made our way through the Strip. Although it was tempting to eat at the old P'burgh standby, Primanti Brothers, I wasn't sure that my heart could take all that grease, so instead we ate lunch at a diner called Pamela's. It's a really greasy spoon (which says something about Primanti Brothers that I chose Pamela's), and in the future, we really need one of those portable placemats so that we can stick finger foods on the table for Margaret. A paper napkin doesn't work since ripping it up is a fun pasttime that defeats the purpose of putting the food on the napkin. So I ended up putting Cheerios right on the marginally clean table, and Margaret had a grand time looking around and eating the occasional Cheerio while shredding napkin after napkin. As we were leaving, I apologized to the waitress for the mess we'd left behind. "No problem," she said. "That's nothing compared to the mess that the policemen make when they eat here."

Margaret fell asleep on the way back to Joe and Mike's place, and I was able to manuever her into the house without waking her. After she woke up, we spent the next hour or so watching TV while waiting for mom and Joe to get back. Perhaps it was the size of their TV or maybe the fact that it was an HDTV, but Margaret cuddled up with me on the couch. She's really not a cuddly baby unless she has a fever like she had at Xmas in Chicago, but she was perfectly happy to sit with me while watching the boob tube and occasionally giggling as she tried to stick her fingers in my nose and mouth. This was around the time that Mike started saying that he'd never seen such a happy, well-behaved baby. My chest swelled with such parental pride! But it couldn't last, could it? Not a chance since a meltdown was inevitable.

But it actually got even better. Once Joe and Abby got home, we headed out to dinner at a place called C.C.'s in Sharpsburg which is just north (or west or northwest - I could never keep my sense of direction in P'burgh) of the city. C.C.'s is a quintessential P'burgh restaurant - just a step above a hole in the wall place with decent, but unpretentious Italian food served by the friendliest Yinzers you've ever met to the friendliest Yinzers you'd ever want to meet. It was getting pretty close to Margaret's bedtime, and we had to wait a while for a table, so there was some trepidation about whether our luck would hold out. But after sucking down a record 10 ounce bottle while waiting in the bar for our table, she was happy as a clam, although she was also getting a bit sleepy. Once we got to our table, we stuck her in her stroller and fed her some Cheerios. Even though it took a long time to get our food, she was sooo happy to spend time making googly eyes at the people at all of the nearby tables. One guy, who was reciprocating lots of googly eyes, said, "Your baby is a good judge of character. Most kids are afraid of me." After 30 minutes of grinning at random strangers all around us, she promptly fell asleep in her stroller which led to even more grins and ahh-would-you-look-at-that glances in our direction. "She's really not like this," I told some people at neighboring tables as we left the restaurant. After all, she's a busy girl! Never wants to sit still!

But I think that Margaret is getting very social and has learned that she can get fun reactions from people when she smiles, waves and bounces around. Not only did she show off at C.C.'s, but she continued her performance at the deli that we went to for brunch on Sunday by which point Mike and Joe were absolutely gushing over Margaret as she shredded more napkins and chortled at the people in the booth next to us. Our run of good luck even lasted until we went to the Safeway back in DC upon getting home. As we pushed Margaret around in the seat on the shopping cart (for the first time!), she was giggling and having a ball. "Heh, heh, heh," she said with a clear sense of pleasure about her situation. Then again, maybe it was just extreme fatigue. But it still led a random woman in the produce department to lean in from behind her to say "Heh, heh, heh" in response.