We like our eggs cooked low and slow in olive oil with feta and pepper.  We like our music loud and fast and popping you're the best thing about me.  He practices with a fork and bobs along in his high chair.  He likes to watch the espresso machine do its magic.  He smiles with his whole body, ears back, arms up, one foot propped on the inside of his tray.

He is still on the edge of language, words mixed in with his emphatic babble and wild gestures.  This is an edge I like, the short window before his thoughts are nailed down with plain and common expression.  This is a guessing game, this is him pointing and throwing his voice into twists and curls, this is my imagination conjuring all sorts of nonsensical answers to his urgent demands.  It is, as a friend said last night, a constant game of baby charades.  And everyday he wakes up with something new in his hustling brain.   Kids have always been a source of wonder in my life, but watching this kid age takes the cake.

We're growing older together, him in miraculous ways, me in slower, calmer ones.  Now I'm in the living room listening to my body, stretching into poses, moving from the weight room to the classroom, from six days a week to three.  Saving grocery receipts and recipes and making smaller, simpler goals for longer spans.  Moving from Donald Miller to Chesterton, from Isaiah to John, from journaling to children's songs that are so darn convincing.  

What a gift when He thought to make us dynamic creatures in a sometimes seemingly static world.  What a good and perfect gift.