A Happy That Can't Be Held Down

Last evening, after first desserts (because there were seconds), Finn and I headed outside for a game of pretend baseball. We have a "real" bat and a "real" ball (both made of some kind of foam-y material that only hurts bad, instead of emergency room bad, when Finn whacks me on the head with it), but Finn prefers this game of pretend pitching and pretend hitting. I think it's because he can hit the ball, bounce it off the moon, and catch it.

My child, the imaginative micromanager.

Before we got to the pretend baseball field (a stretch of sidewalk in front of somebody's house who I'm sure has issued the crazy on us), Finn got stalled in some butterfly giggles in our yard, giggles that stopped me in my tracks. And as anyone who knows me well can testify, I am a victim to my own momentum. I am Newton's first law incarnate. So to have a mere giggle stop me and turn me around. Well, you needed to hear that giggle.

It's hard to describe it without resorting to cliches: it was like tiny silver bells, it was like warmth and innocence and pure joy, it was unrestrained, unrehearsed, unexpected. It was as if he had been filled up with pure happiness and just a few drops planned a last minute escape over his edges, like champagne bubbles floating up and then skipping over the edges of an overpoured flute.

(I thought that analogy would go over better than the heady beer image I'm really thinking of.)