I wrote last about a transcendent snuggle between Juno and myself.
Tonight, I rock her back to sleep after a bad dream, but unlike last time, it’s depressingly hollow comfort. The snuggle is full of gentle, whispered breathing, and tiny hands, and all the normal comforts of contact. But mentally, I am elsewhere.
Juno, age 1 and a half, has confidence in her convictions.
That’s a euphemism. More plainly, she knows what she wants. Even more specifically, she knows what she doesn’t want.
I suppose we lacked a little foresight giving her a name that literally includes the word “no” in it, because she’s so proficient with it. Like a burgeoning mastermind, she’s experimenting with pitch to see which version of “no” achieves the ideal outcome. When her drawn out, vocal fry, plaintive, “noooooooooo” mostly succeeded at making us laugh, she changed tactics. Right now she’s really vibing with the whole body, staccato, “No! No! No!”s whenever we approach her with a hair brush. She’ll pitch her body —off your lap, off the couch, off a cliff if needs be—if you so much as have a secretive hair elastic between your fingers.
Juno has the emotional range of an 88-key grand piano. It is large and it is loud except when it is meek, and squeaky. Her emotions strike chords, beautiful ones that you didn’t know existed. Her ‘happy’ is loud and bouncy, staccato and ebullient. She babbles around middle C most of the day, before going full Beethoven when you take away her yogurt (which, yes, it’s crusting her hair into dreadlocks, it’s under her fingernails, it’s clinging to her face for dear life no matter how many passes you do with a baby wipe) too soon.