Capturing Autism

At our family dinner table, we will sometimes rate our weekdays. Brooks is a natural optimist (and lover of clown noses) and will usually give himself a ten, barring any odd disturbing event that would bump it down to a seven.

But my husband and I never go above an eight. Not because we whine about our work days–which we do–but because any ten for us would have to be a day spent with Brooks.

We are rather smitten with him.

Like blogger MOM – NOS, who loves her newly-turned 13-year-old son so much it makes her head spin, and Beth Kephart, who loves her college graduate son so much that “there’s no math that will contain it,” and Heather Armstrong of dooce.com, who has chronicled her daughters’ lives and wrote this about her eldest at five months old:

I cannot keep your face out of my mouth, it is just so scrumptious and plump and chewy and round. You have a lot more hair on your head, so instead of putting your whole head in my mouth I bite off your ears and nose and gnaw on your chin. And then I go back for more cheeks. Sometimes I just can’t stop and I end up swallowing you whole and I walk around with your feet hanging out of my mouth. When your father comes home from work he asks, “Where’s the baby?” And I have to confess, “I ate her.”

Autism or no autism, tiny or grown, this type of behavior seems to go on everywhere.

Someone should figure out how to bottle it.