Our inquisitive, contented and adorable boy

Right from the start, Benjy was very alert and inquisitve - wide-eyed, he would look around a room, observing, taking it all in. He could hold his head up almost immediately so had no problem making sure that he didn't miss a thing. At five weeks he gave us his first smile, and hasn't stopped since. He loves attention, and will give a beautiful big smile to anyone who looks at him - this makes him very popular when we are out shopping, out walking, at the park, at the doctor - pretty much everywhere he goes, Benjy seems to attract admirers. And then the smile turned into a laugh, and what a laugh it is. Sometimes a giggle, sometimes a chuckle, sometimes a full-on hearty, throaty laugh; sometimes at something expected, and sometimes at the strangest of things - today, he laughed so loud, long and hard when I zipped up my coat that people on the other side of the road came over to see what was so funny.

He is a noisy baby, in a good way. Once he found his voice ('ooh', 'aah') he decided he liked the sound of it, and now 'talks' for long stretches, in a very animated manner. From 'ah-oh', to 'ah-oooh', and more recently onto 'pa', 'ma' and 'ababababa', punctuated with blowing raspberries, it's the sound that wakes me up in the morning, and it can continue all day long.

Of course, despite him being a very easy baby, it hasn't always been plain sailing, but one of the things I love about being his mummy is knowing how to calm him down. In those first, sometimes fraught, few weeks, a constant success at calming him would be to take him outside. Lucky that he was a summer baby, as we spent a lot of time going in and out of the garden. As he got older, a nursery rhyme would calm him down; a book always works well; and of course, lots of cuddles. Now, he rarely needs calming down; he is such a happy, contented little thing. And even when he's not, and he's been up all night, after he gives me his first smile of the day - who cares?