This post is simply to celebrate the best thing in the world, which is: babies.

I post this today because it was one year ago today that I found out, with great joy, that I was expecting my youngest. As I write this, he is three months old, and a truly superior baby: A+ work if I do say so myself. I love all babies (how could anyone not!), but my favorite stage of babyhood, if I had to pick one, is probably from birth through approximately five months. The age where they are just helpless cute gurgly blobs, and you can set them down and step away for a minute and they will still be in that same spot when you come back. 10/10. (Of course, when mine hits five months, I’m sure that I’ll change my mind and decide that five months is my favorite age, then six months, and so on; this happens to me every time.)

I sincerely don’t think there’s any more purely delightful element of the human experience than the company of a tiny baby. There’s something supernatural about it, I think. Little kids are aware of this, too: they are drawn to babies, and have this intense wonder and delight about them, and always want to hold them. Rolling through the grocery store with my baby in the car seat holder of the shopping cart, everyone, but especially little kids, absolutely loses it when they see him: “it’s a baby!!!”

I feel like this phenomenon, of tiny humans seeing other, tinier humans and being immediately filled with senseless delight and desire to hold and care for, is just another sign of how good and sacred a thing human life is. Whenever there’s a baby, everyone wants to hold it. (Unless they’re nervous, which is fair; I am usually nervous around other people’s babies, because they’re like little extensions of their parents, so interacting with them just as socially stressful as interacting with their parent, if not more so, because if you screw up the interaction with the baby, the parent will be angrier than if you’d screwed up an interaction with them (the parent) directly. But! That doesn’t mean that I’m not at the same time, on some level, desiring to hold the baby.)

How can you not want to hold a baby? How can you look at a baby and not want to violently throw objects against a wall and/or physically fight someone because it’s just so cute? The following are some of my favorite things about a baby. This list is far from comprehensive, so do feel free to chime in:

13. Baby’s involuntary arm and leg movements. The way these movements look exactly the way they felt while they were in your belly. It’s the very same thing! I mean, obviously it is, and you already knew that in your brain, but to see it with your own eyes – I always get such a kick (no pun intended) out of that.

12. Fuzzy newborn ears. I don’t know if your babies had this, but all four of mine were born with fuzz on the edges of their ears. It goes away sometime in the first month or two, which is always heartbreaking.

11. The bottom of the baby. Why are babies’ butts so cute? “Baby Butt” was, in fact, how my husband and I inexplicably found ourselves referring to our firstborn, all the time, when she was a baby. Because the butt was just so cute. Cuteness aggression-inducing fun fact: did you know that patting a baby’s butt often calms them down because it reminds them of when they were in your belly and their little butt was (hopefully) pointed up, and they could feel your heartbeat there?

10. Baby smells (and lack thereof). We all know that a baby’s head smells great. But can we also talk about how babies are the only people in the world who don’t smell bad? Breastfed baby poop doesn’t stink. Baby’s breath doesn’t even stink. It’s like they’re such pure creatures they’re incapable of producing a bad odor.

9. The way their little arms aren’t quite long enough to reach up and touch hands over the top of their giant head. Can you imagine having a head that size?

8. Baby noises. Those first little sounds that baby starts to make when they’re first figuring out that they can make sounds – it’s almost a shame when they start to learn words (not really, of course).

7. The mind-boggling fact that they’re a whole entire person, a whole individual, who will one day be big but for now they are yours and you can literally just pick them up and carry them around.

6. The newborn scrunch when you pick them up. Its the most satisfying thing; I get such vicarious pleasure. My three-month-old has pretty much stopped scrunching, by now, which is devastating.

5. Staring. Staring at things, my baby’s pediatrician said, in all seriousness, is an important part of his development, so it’s good to take time to just stare at your baby and let them stare at you. Which is awesome, because I love to sit and stare at my baby and be stared at by him. I also love it when babies stare at me in public. Just watching them absorb information like that is so cool. At what point does it stop being cute and become unnerving and rude, though?

4. The fuzzy head. I know some babies are born with lots of hair, and others are born totally bald, but all four of mine have been born with just a nice soft layer of kiwi fuzz, which is so soft and soothing to pet.

3. Cheeks. The fat cheeks of a baby: delectable. Some moms talk about wanting to eat their babies’ feet, which I wholeheartedly relate to, but for me, it’s even more so the cheeks. I actually still sometimes try to nom on my almost-three-year-old’s cheeks.

2. Rooting, om nomming, and the feeding face. The little open-mouthed head bob that a new baby does is the cutest thing on this planet. And the way that, if you put them in the feeding position, or even put your knuckle or something near their mouth, the little toothless mouth pops open and starts om nomming. The sheer determination with which a baby will thrust its face towards something it believes to be food, mouth wide open! They’re like little animals. Also, the face that a new baby makes while it’s feeding: the businesslike, serious stare straight ahead; or sometimes, when they get a little older, the way they smile up at you and laugh mid-feed. Totally worth the mess.

And obviously, the thing that makes me the most insane:

1. Baby smiles and happy squiggles. Any baby smile is gold, but when your own baby smiles or laughs, it seriously feels like some kind of really good drug. And, even better, when the baby is just laying there chilling, and then you walk up to them and they see you and then they smile and start involuntarily squiggling their arms and legs? It makes you want to scream and punch something just thinking about it.