Gushy Mushiness

Neither Emile nor I have ever been accused of being the world's most emotionally demonstrative individuals, but we seem to have brought two of them into the world. I think I've mentioned before that Larkin tells us she loves us every time she forgets what she was going to say mid-sentence. Well, Finn has taken to yelling our names at the top of his lungs when he is across the house from us (if more than one of us is across the house, it's "Hey, Guys?") and when we respond, he says (much more quietly), "I love you." And he'll keep yelling at us until we say we love him, too.

We've been talking a lot about age, growing, relative size and babies recently. For a while, Larkin was mathematically fascinated by the fact that Finn would *always* be 2 years younger than her. "Wait, you mean when I'm 54 he'll be 52?!" This morphed into a conversation about how much bigger they will be when they reach that ripe old age, as well as how much smaller they were not so long ago. Initially, Larkin was seriously jonesin' to get older. Ten was apparently the perfect age. Finn, however, got a little freaked out by the whole aging notion and crawled up into my lap, wrapped his arms around me and said, "No me want to grow big. I want to stay little so we can snuggle." Sigh. Larkin apparently took his gentle admonition of her enthusiasm to heart and also got slightly paranoid about the possible pitfalls of growing older. A long conversation about the pros and cons of being children vs. being adults ensued. Reassurance was issued that I would be happy to snuggle them no matter how large they got. I'm not sure which parts of that conversation were most influential, but Larkin now tells me several times a week that she's glad she's still a kid and thanks me for helping her have such a fun childhood.

Score!

In other (less serious) relationship news, this morning Larkin informed me that she had "broken up with the pink xylitol candies." I believe my response was: "Huh?" She patiently explained to me, "That's what happens when you don't like something as much as you used to." Thanks, YouTube.

This exchange also happened spontaneously this morning, presumably also inspired from some nauseatingly cute cartoon from YouTube (I'm inclined to blame CareBears but have not actually seen enough myself to have convincing evidence):

Larkin: When you love somebody, they are always in your heart.
Me: Well, I guess you two are pretty well lodged in my heart.
Finn: Yeah, because we're so small.