mornings with quinn

Some guy that's on a poetry forum with Dave sent him a message asking him how things were going with Quinn.

Things with Quinn are going great.

This morning I was holding him in a pillow in my lap, sitting him up so we could be face to face. He'd scratched his face up because I hadn't had the balls to cut his nails in a while. One of his scratches is right around where his third eye would be, giving him a vaguely Hindu look. And he looked so wise this morning, I felt like I was holding a tiny teacher in my lap. We had a conversation. He was very serious with me - Finn is often very serious with me, when we talk.

It's sort of odd, referring to him as Finn. We almost never call him Finn. We refer to him as:

*Muffin
*Muffins McGee
*The Squizzler
*Mr. Squizzles
*The Buddy (as in, "Will you look after the buddy for a minute while I run to the bathroom?")
*Cutes McGoots
*Muggy Wuggins
*Lovey Buggy
*Mr. Fartybottom

Et cetera, ad infinitum.

It's all dignity, all the time around here.

So we were having a conversation this morning, wherein he would make a noise and I would say something encouraging like, "Tell me more!" or "You don't say!" or "Wow! And what else?" or "I'm listening!"

And then it occurred to me that I wasn't really listening. I was just pausing. So I tried to really, seriously listen. Listen underneath his face, his head, his body, underneath us in the room. It was like trying to stay underwater while wearing a suit of floaties. I kept bobbing up to the surface, where I can't really hear him. I feel like there's a place underneath us where if I can stay down there long enough, I can hear all of his meaning without the bother of the English language getting in the way.

So I bobbed around up there and tried to be heavy and sink into the silence while I waited for him to speak. His face shifted from regular baby to something like a world-weary Tibetan, and he offered up the word "bllrrr" in a cushion of bubbles.

I wish I knew what he meant.

******

Finn was in his Moses basket this morning wrapped up in his white swaddle blanket. Dave looked down at him and said, "We should scoot him over to one side and fill up the rest of the basket with Red Robin fries." He was too right. He totally looked like an order of Finn and chips waiting to be completed.

******

In other news, my feet keep slipping around underneath me today. I think somebody snuck in last night and replaced our floors with an ice rink or a raked stage.

******

Also, just you wait. I'm going to take pictures and show you the hilarious thing Dave does with Finn. I hope its hilarity translates! It might not. But it might! But it'll only happen if stupid Blogger lets me post a goddamn photo*.

*Oh, you know what I'm referring to, Blogger.