And we thought he would never talk!
We recently took our son out to celebrate his 18th birthday. Where did the time go? Many years ago he was a quiet, mellow infant, content with the things that babies usually like – milk, his Nuk, the battery-powered glider or the bouncy chair, and discovering the world around him and what his body could do… He was an easy or “good” baby, not fussy or colicky. From the beginning he had an amazing ability to communicate his needs. Somehow he told us what he wanted, usually with a glance and a grunt. We wondered if he would ever talk, since words seemed so unnecessary to him.
Nowadays it seems as if he never stops talking. We’ve never heard him talking in his sleep and we suspect that he’s appropriately quiet in his classes at school most of the time. But most of the time if we can see him, we can hear him. From frustrated rants about bad calls by the referees at the football game to educated discussion of the economy of China, he is never at a loss for words.
At the restaurant, celebrating his birthday, he was musing about why he couldn’t have been born a minority; it would be so much easier to get accepted at one of his top choices for college. He calls it “the minority button.” Oh why could he not have been born 1/8th American Indian or something besides pure white male? I was adopted as an infant so I suggested that if I could find information on my birth parents that maybe we could discover some minority blood somewhere in his heritage. And he could certainly pass as part American Indian from his facial features. So it was that we decided that he needed an Indian name. Without missing a beat, his dad blurted out:
“Running Mouth”
Yes, he is an Enneagram Seven.