Joy Drops

Life is interesting.  It's challenging, strange, frustrating, tall, confusing, discombobulating, hectic, tiring and full on.  It's covered in love, pasted with kisses, embraced in hugs, filled with hilarity and splattered with joy drops that come in so many different ways.

I love my son.  He makes my heart sing.  When he laughs, it makes me ecstatic.  And oh, he does enjoy laughing!  When he's happy, he kicks his feet around like he's dancing a gigue.  Because as you know, a smile is happiness showing, laughter is happiness that can't be contained by a mere smile and must be heard, so dancing is happiness that must be seen!  All ways that joy explodes and affects those around it.  Our boy is good for making that happen.

He's getting so expressive.  The other night he woke up for a feed and didn't want to go right back to sleep.  Adrian was putting him to bed and had put him down for a bit to work off some of his energy.  I walked in the room past him to see how it was all going.  As I entered the quite dark room, our son shouted happily: "Bup!".  I'm not exactly sure what 'bup' means, but I think it's one of these three things:

a) Good day, Mom! It's great to see you and have the whole family in one room.  Shall we party?
b) You never told me how exciting it is to be awake in a dark room!  Shall we party?
c) Ha ha, I think its morning time even though it's completely dark outside.  Shall we party?

I'm glad that he's starting to make sense and be utterly understandable as Adrian and I are losing the ability.  Our little fellow is close to eating solids and is making this need known by waking up more frequently for milk in the night and he's been a bit under the weather, so we're tireder than we have been in awhile.

As you may know, babies make all sorts of sounds, some of which aren't used the in the language group that they are born into.  They lose the ability to make these sounds that they don't hear early in childhood.  The other day, our boy made a clicky-poppy sound.  I was very excited and asked Adrian if he'd heard it.  Adrian said, "Yes, it's just like a calamari bushman."  Now, to be fair, he and our boy had just been playing with a Lamaze toy in the shape of a squid who is called (and I refer here to the tag, we didn't name him) "Carl Calamari".  {An aside:  While it is interesting that Lamaze would encourage children to think of animals as food (surely Sammy Squid would work), it's also an interesting combination of names.  Carlo Calamari sounds better.  Especially as the squid friend is a pirate.} Also, to be fair, it is only one sound different from Kalahari.  And later that day I did tell my brother that he was a good physician, I mean physicist.

Perhaps if we all spoke as succinctly and used more "bups" and dances than words to explain ourselves we would be more effective.  Or maybe just more effective as spreading joy.