Another birthday. He’s five months old. He can do all sorts of brilliant things now besides squealing and sucking his feet. His new thing is that he scratches absolutely everything with all the fingers of one hand at once—the material of the couch, my chest, the sheet of his bassinet, which, against the plastic-covered foam pad, sounds like “scritch scritch scritch.” It’s sort of spasmodic and eerie, because in the silence those tiny little fingers are the only things moving. It sounds like someone who has been buried alive and is scratching the top of a coffin. “Stop doing that,” I say, “it’s
...more
