Sat with friends and family, visiting with nice people I don’t get to see often enough. We had delicious shrimp and the best lasagna you’ve ever tasted. Listened to Sinatra and Dean-o and Glenn Miller CDs. It was a lovely day.
Got to meet my god-second-cousin-in-law today. (My wife’s godparents have two daughters. Those girls and my wife all grew up together. One of them now has two children of their own. We call The Yankee’s godparents aunt and uncle. That makes their daughters would-be cousins. Their children would be second-cousins. Do try to keep up.)
I held her, and then watched her as she rolled around on the floor. And then I got to hold her again. There was a house full of people and she is one of the stars, so you count each experience.
One of the other stars of the show is her big sister. She speaks four languages. She’s crunching math and serious logic and reasoning with no problem. She’s three. She and I played three long hands of Go Fish and one exciting game of Hide-and-Seek, this being the first time that she’s ever wanted to hang out with me. She pronounced that I was “full of the sillies.”
But toward the end of the evening the little one made one last lap back around to me. She has a way of staring into your eyes, unblinking, for the longest time. And every so often she’d lean down and touch my nose.
Once she started the crying feint, and then collapsed into my arms in a perfect snuggle.
I melted. It was almost, almost, enough to make you want to take up babysitting.
