The stillness of morning in Fayetteville. Our waking, or at least mine, is due to the increasingly excited grunting of a seven-month-old. His eyes startle me for a moment with their blueness, something he inherited neither from myself nor my wife.
At 1:00am he had awoken and I'd brought him to our bed to nurse. We fell asleep before he finished and so he ended up spending the night with us - something I'd figured was going to happen. I was too tired to take him back to his room, anyway.
So upon my waking at 7:30am there he is: sitting upright with his mother's help, gazing around, smiling, and making small consonant sounds to the morning.
My wife is overtired from weeks of long hours at work and I no longer have moments when I do not smell baby poop - the scent is glued to the sensory receptors in my brain so that, whenever my wife asks me if I smell something in particular I can only reply, "Poop? I only smell poop."
And I love it.
