Let's Talk Sepia

This week's assignment in the "Beautiful People" class I'm taking with Cheryl Johnson is to photograph babies and/or young children. Although I take lots of pictures of middle school and high school aged kids (11 years and up), I rarely take pictures of little ones. I called a friend who has a 7  month old, and she happily agreed to let me take pictures.  This is one of my favorites from the session. I turned it to sepia before I read a comment from Cheryl on another post that she generally doesn't care for sepia, as it feels too much like you're coloring the photograph (Cheryl gives lots of really useful comments on photographs, by the way.  It's one of the best things about the class so far). I hadn't thought about that before, and I was wondering what your thoughts were.  Here's what the original photograph looked like:

And here's what the photograph looks like in black and white:

So, which do you prefer?  And what do you think about sepia, in general?