Thank you... I'll be here all night. Don't forget to tip your waitress

This morning I got my first smile from Mika. And it wasn't just a throw-away smile, either -- she was responding to a joke I was telling her... seriously! Finally, I have a captive audience who will appreciate my sense of humor (Yuki has gotten into the frustrating habit of giving me a stone-faced look every time I tell a joke, just to torture me).

Getting the smile wasn't easy, even though our parenting books suggested that the smiles flow like water after the third week. Not so much. So I started doing all kinds of ridiculous things to get her to smile. I tried voices, faces, and even some relatively involved physical comedy routines... nothing.

Then, as I was playing with Mika this morning, I started joking about how the local news stations have been butchering the names of locations in Tokyo as part of their coverage of the Red Sox trip to Japan. I garbled Akihabara just like the reporter did last night and she burst into a big grin. Out of the corner of my eye, I think I saw Yuki roll her eyes -- not only because my joke was marginally funny (at best), but also because she knows I'm going to be intolerable now I've realized Mika might smile at my stupid jokes.