I have two babies but until recently I was used to seeing them one at a time. An eye blink ago Max was very much a babe-in-arms. And Lola a blossoming toddler. Now that Max is sitting up, the whole world has changed. He has always tracked her every move with adoring eyes, but now he make his own lunge for her whenever it takes his fancy. And he does. He launches himself like a rugby forward, without any thought for the hard floor, wall or strange object in his path. He wants to be close to her, to be walking like her, to be talking like her. I think he might skip crawling, because he only wants to do what she does.
Until recently she hasn’t wanted to have much to do with him. But that is changing, too. Now she says “Coo coo Maxi!” every morning and gives him a little kiss on the head of a tiny hug. She often tells me to pass him off to his dad or his nanny, but a few days ago, when an admiring stranger scooped him up, she said, “No! Maxi with mummy!”. Her first visible protective urge towards him. I know he is going to love her more than all of us. He just does.
Seeing them together made me think of all those great collective nouns… a murder of crows, a pride of lions. They are my adorable of babies.
Seeing them together makes my heart swell more than ever, and lends an even greater sense of surreality to life in general. How did he come to be here, this perfect little fella? No drugs, no agonising. Just here, with minimum fuss and heartburn. He was dangling from his jolly jumper this morning and she was pushing him around in an ill-judged but well-meant kind of way and I imagined how they might be a year from now, tearing around together. Little mates.
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