:: Dimpled and Sticky ::

Evan's hands. I could write a war and Peace-length tome on Evan's hands. The way they grab, hold, tug, push, pull, squeeze, and pinch. The way the curl up when he's sleeping. The way they've grown calloused on two fingers where his teeth hit them as he sucks on his fingers.

The way they used to curl around our fingers reflexively when he was a newborn and how, unlike many other infants, he seemed always to want his fingers spread wide open from the day he was born. Ten, he always seemed to be saying. Or maybe shouting Stop! at full body-language volume. My mother always called his hands expressive and she was right.

I've always loved kid hands because even when the chubs and dimples of babyhood begun to disappear from the arms and then the legs and face as babies grow into toddlers who grow into hellraisers, the hands always seem to maintain a little bit of the babiness. A little bit of the chub and dimple. I see pictures around the blogs I read of three-year-old children with baby hands and just feel so reassured that something of babyhood will remain with us for awhile.

And yet today, today I noticed that Evan's hands are beginning to be toddler hands. They're still babyish in the ways I just mentioned, and I suspect they'll stay that way, but there's something new and different about them. An older, toddler-ier quality.

His hands are always hot now, for example: red from crawling and grabbing and working so hard at everything. And they are always slightly stained -- orange from some carrots he stuck his fist in at lunch, maybe, or blue from putting them in his mouth with a bite of blueberry applesauce. When he returns from daycare they're often marked with paint and dye. Even the slight stickiness I always associate with Kindergarteners is starting already. This morning it was from bananas that never completely washed off (talk about developing fine motor skills, by the way: give a 9-month-old a cut-up banana and watch him try to get the pieces off his tray...). Tonight it was pears. The result isn't just stick but stuff... cat hairs, fuzz, little bits of household things holding firmly to the skin of Evan's pudgy little hands.

I used to think that was something I would hate about motherhood, but it turns out I was wrong.