Simon is now in the thrall of himself and enjoys his own reflection whenever he sees it. For a long time I assumed he had no idea that he was looking at himself, but now I’m beginning to suspect otherwise. He loves all babies and small children, but he seems to have an especially soft spot for his own reflection.
Sadly, we encourage this behavior. In the morning, Simon is often distracted from eating breakfast by his dim reflection in the kitchen windows. He’ll pause between bites, caught up in the wonder of himself, and only intermittently focus on the task at hand. Matt calls this image “ghost baby”, has created a morbid story behind ghost baby’s demise, and has even written a little song about it (The baby, not his demise. And truthfully, he ripped off the song from Rancid.). Much as I like the song, I prefer to think of the window image as “alternate universe baby,” who is visible only once a day when a small portal opens in the firmament separating his universe from ours. But try getting that interpretation into a song lyric, I dare you!
As you can see, the sleep deprivation is really getting to us both.
Another time Simon enjoys his own reflection is before and after his bath. Matt almost always stands Simon on the sink and has him look at “the naked baby in the mirror”. (There’s a song for this, too.) Simon loves naked mirror baby and smiles for him every time. Once his bath is over, Simon gets a chance to smile at wet naked baby, who may be the funniest thing ever. Is it the wet lashes? The messed up hair? The cottage cheese tush? We’ll never know…
But today was the best of all. We hung up our new 20? X 30? wall portrait (and good lord that thing is huge. Didn’t look nearly so huge in the studio, but now is clearly the same size as, if not slightly bigger than, its subject) and brought Simon over to view it. Well, he just went nuts. He kicked it. He reached for it. He laughed and cooed and screeched at it. And then, finally, he gave it/himself a big round of applause. No dearth of self esteem this one.
Too cute. I just need to make sure I don’t let him turn into a little Narcissus.