Reeling us in

Desmond was eight months on Thursday.  He celebrated by spending most of the day sleeping, as he has his first ever cold.  He's handling it well, except for the moments when he realizes that he cannot breathe through his nose and ERUPTS in a cauldron of anger, nasal fluid and dismay.  It would be heartbreaking if it weren't so damn cute because it only lasts a few seconds and as soon as it is over he goes back to his smiley self.

He's a pretty happy kid.  I know his parents are as well.  We expected parenting to be a roller coaster, especially when our child would be unable to communicate with us in our own language, but he is so easy to read.  He cries when he is upset, be it hunger (the full spoon of food had better be back in the mouth less than two seconds after its been removed or there will be heck to pay), pain (he has rolled into a few hard structures lately with no permanent damage, and his teeth are cutting through his gums like a machete cuts through sugar cane) or frustration (he understands now that if we take something away from him we are impeding on his fun); it's pretty simple to determine why he is fussing, and he generally stops in appreciation when we address it.

Ah, we get along well.  I have a hard time believing that this kid will ever scream "I HATE YOU!!!" or want to sneak out of the house or eat his own shoelaces rather than tell us anything, but I know someday he's going to be a kid instead of a baby, and then a teen instead of a kid, etc etc etc (cuing my inner Yul Brunner here...); I guess this is why we start out as babies, so that our parents will fall completely in love with us and therefore tolerate whatever crap we try to pull once we start growing.  And by "tolerate" I mean "not kill us."  Looking back, I must have been one heckuva cute baby because I drove my folks nuts once I hit ten, and yet, here I still am.

Our son flirts with strangers.  He wraps them around his finger in about two seconds.  He knows he is doing this now, and he enjoys it.  He understands the power that he has.  We are thinking about paying people to ignore him.

I thought that there would be times when he was a baby that I would toss my arms up in complete confusion with no idea as to what he wanted or what was wrong, and just try to plug my ears until he fell asleep.  Hasn't happened.  I speak the same language that our baby does, and when he cries, all I think about is how much he needs us.  We're fortunate that he really doesn't cry much, that he seems so happy all of the time, but we also know that we probably control none of that.  He could wake up tomorrow and decide that he wants to do nothing but cry just to confound us, and we'll react the same way. 

He's got us hooked.  He knows it.  We don't even try to hide it.  The center of our universe is twenty-eight inches long, weighs twenty-five pounds and has as many teeth as the average ninety-seven year old.