Sometimes you look at a newborn’s face and just know — ours is a Nikita. As in Khrushchev. Born just in time for Thanksgiving, she’s no picture-perfect Butterball, like her older brother Zeke was, but blotchy, wrinkled and shrunken, with chapped, old-man skin, sharp-heeled simian feet, and a flaming red, bony baboon butt. Her face, at least, is baby-pudgy, but still wizened-looking. Bald-headed, broad-nosed, with that pudgy-yet-wizened face, the resemblance between her and Khrushchev is a little less than fanciful. She is also, of course, very beautiful.

Babies are by definition beautiful, even when they’re a little funny-looking. Was your bundle of joy born looking like Uncle Fester? Beautiful. Like a garden gnome (as one of @qoumidan‘s was)? Beautiful!

Nikita was born a little late, and it’s apparently not uncommon for the late arrivers, who’ve marinated in there a little too long, to come out looking a bit scalded and worse for wear, even when they’re otherwise perfectly healthy — which, thank God, Nikita is. Her eyes aren’t the usual baby-blue, either, but nearly black, lending her an eerie, alien demeanor when she squints them up into slits, hiding the whites. Other times, when she yawns, she screws her face up into a pirate-y snarl. In the days since Thanksgiving, she’s smoothened out a little, to look more like the little angels babies are supposed to resemble. Perhaps in a few weeks, her de-weirding will be complete. But before it is, I thought I’d commemorate her first appearance to the world. After all, every baby is beautiful, but not every baby gets to look like Khrushchev.

Have you known any funny-looking babies?