No Mr. Dickens, greater

You are not at all what we expected.

A screaming, sobbing newborn is what we most likely envisaged being handed to us. The reality was a silence, a stand-off. Your parents being no exception, you stared everyone out, the only sign of anything bordering uncertainty being the occasional slow blink, eyelids peeling themselves back to the point of impossibility to let the entire world in. And out.

Weeks have passed and we’re become more and more familiar. An evolution is taking place; I now know nibbling on your chin and neck makes you laugh a tongue flapping laugh, you’ve learned how to burrow your way into the sweetest spot under my neck, little head butts clearing a path towards sleep, and I know how much you enjoy feasting on your own fingers, often with an entire fist falling fowl to your gummy jaws, it’s limited dimensions being all that stops you gorging on everything up to the elbow.

Your world is limited but you rule it, nothing disturbs or upsets you here. You seem to know this is your home. Your babbling, while frequent, is contained to gurgles that are at first wrapped up and then let loose in more combinations of vowels than are imaginable.

It’s scary to contemplate the things you might say to us were you able, all fierce and bold and sure. Until then, every day you tell it like it is in your own way.

It is ridiculous to call it such, but you possess an unusual confidence. Maybe it’s better described as an inherent comfort with how you are and what you do, in your own 7 week old universe. You lie content in your surroundings, yelping instructions when something is not as it should be, smiling and laughing when it suits you to make us do your bidding.

I wonder when does that comfort fade in people, when might you become as unsure or uncertain as the rest of us. Never, I hope.

No, you are most certainly not at all what we expected.