I’ve mentioned before how Kiddo#4 has curious hands and hungry fingers. He’s the grabbiest baby I’ve ever seen, taking in the world and needing to touch everything that comes within reach.
He’s a lot happier now that he can move about independently and feed his own hungry fingers. Prior to that, he had to wait for me to hand things to him, or to come accidentally within reach of something. Now, he can reward himself. In fact, he gets a self-satisfied grin when he crawls to something he never did before. You can just hear him thinking, “See, Momma? I rewarded myself.”
Nowadays, when he wakes up, it’s an instant race as he flips onto all fours and makes a beeline for my bookcase headboard where he can grab all the things I left on the shelf. He considers it the buffet for his hungry fingers.
On Sunday, we went to church in the snow. By which I mean, snow was falling at about an inch an hour, and there were three inches on the ground already. We had no idea it was that bad when we started, but it was bad enough by the time we got out that we opted against getting Sunday donuts! You know it’s bad for that to happen.
We were bundled up tight, but I’d forgotten to invert the sleeves of the baby’s snowsuit in order to make them mittens. (The best feature ever, by the way.) And as we went outside, he saw the snow.
Falling, cold, white, clear, brilliant.
And with his face a mask of delighted wonder, he reached out his hungry fingers to sample the air.
I watched him for a while as he tried so many times to grasp the ungraspable, trying to figure out the whiteness and the cold, things he couldn’t touch but which he could see and feel. It was like magic to him, a whole wonderful world he’d never known before. And he laughed.
My next thought was, just like grace. Ungraspable. Brilliant, Ephemeral. And when it’s all around us, sometimes the best we can do is to laugh in delight.
