Enthusiasm

A friend recently inferred that I now persistently speak like I am a children's television presenter. There is no doubt about it, she is certainly correct in her observation. It took me a while to figure out why my voice has changed pitch since the arrival of Lena. For some time I worried that I was being falsely happy, like a robotic perma-cheer-mum.

It was when I saw her playing in the park that I realised why I sound so amazed at objects she spots and actions she does. She spent an hour in the sandpit. An hour! Just placing neat little piles of sand on the top of the mini log fencing that envelops it. I was just watching her, delicately touching the grains, flapping wildly with her hands in an effort to make fluffy butterflies, trickling little piles and then swatting them flat. She found it fascinating. She finds absolutely everything fascinating. A fair part of her day is made up of new experiences, things she's never done or felt or even known could be done or felt. Be it the feel of the iron railings on the neighbours front wall as we walk by, a new breed of dog (aka wofwof,) a pebble colour that she hasn't studied before or the bounce of damp turf as she runs across Greenwich Park. Her day is filled with absolute wonder.

When you spend day in, day out with someone who gets so excited about a helicopter in the sky she screams 'hello' at the top of her lungs and waves frantically just to make sure that it can see her, it is really rather hard not to find that kind of joy contagious.