Small friend

i have a small friend who i get to hang with every week.
he is very fun.
his skills have increased by leaps and bounds just in the short time i have had the pleasure of 'sitting' him.

he can now climb everything in the loungeroom - except for the mantlepiece (though he has not left it untried!) - no coffee cup is safe, nor handbag placed however high.
no plate or keyboard, phone, computer plug..

if i do not pay him enough attention, he will fix me with a mournful gaze and sign for a drink - upon reception of which, he pushes away scornfully. afterwards he allows himself a cheeky grin.

his vocabulary is also growing at a great rate. there are a few small quirks - like persisting in calling both parents 'dad-ad-ad' - and he has quickly worked out how to turn new knowledge to his own ends..

apparently just the other day he was in bed protesting his imprisonment most passionately. his protests went ignored, until there were soft calls of 'poo, poo..' a parent came quickly - only to discover a very small boy crying wolf: the nappy was empty.

small friend wakes from sleep so cheerily content.
eyebrows raised, eyes wide, mouth a narrow 'o', he flaps his arms wildly when excited.

small friend is quick to rush to the pram when the words 'outside' 'walk' or 'pram' are mentioned. even hunting for keys does the trick.

small friend has the sharpest eyes and ears. he will spot a bird when it's just a dark stripe on the horizon, and point with wondering excitement whenever he hears their song.

small friend acts the baby bird himself - ducking to get food from his elders, mouth wide open and limbs outstretched.
small friend totters round the yard with fangs of baked bean sauce dribbling down his cheeks...

small friend is growing too fast!

Waking up on two legs

"Children ten years old wake up and find themselves here, discover themselves to have been here all along; is this sad? They wake like sleepwalkers, in full stride; they wake like people brought back from cardiac arrest or drowning: in media res, surrounded by familiar people and objects, equipped with a hundred skills. They know the neighbourhood, they can read and write English, they are old hands at the commonplace mysteries, and yet they feel themselves to have just stepped off the boat, just converged with their bodies, just flown down from a trance, to lodge in an eerily familiar life already well under way.
...
Consciousness converges with the child as a landing tern touches the outspread feet of its shadow on the sand: precisely, toe hits toe. The tern folds its wings to sit; its shadow dips and spreads over the sand to meet and cup its breast.
Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool. Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms. The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after."

[An American Childhood by Annie Dillard. HarperPerennial, 1987]

I love how Dillard describes this coming-to-awareness. Beyond the waking as a child, I know the strange feeling of suddenly noticing oneself - that feeling when you step back, step outside yourself and become your own self's observer, just for a moment.

"Who turned on the lights? You did, by waking up: you flipped the light switch, started up the wind machine, kicked on the flywheel that spins the years. Can you catch hold of a treetop, or will you fly off the diving planet as she rolls? Can you ride out the big blow on a coconut palm's trunk until you fall asleep again, and the winds let up?
...
Knowing you are alive is feeling the planet buck under you, rear, kick, and try to throw you; you hang on to the ring. It is riding the planet like a log downstream, whooping. Or, conversely, you step aside from the dreaming fast loud routine and feel time as a stillness about you, and hear the silent air asking in so thin a voice, Have you noticed yet that you will die? Do you remember, remember, remember? Then you feel your life as a weekend, a weekend you cannot extend, a weekend in the country."

May I stay waking, and ride it well.