The Face

Harrison has been cracking us up lately—the kind of cracking up that surfaces hours or days later when you happen to think randomly about whatever-it-was when you're alone at your desk or car and causes coworkers or strangers to wonder whether you've (finally) gone off the deep end.

The funniest of Harrison's activities is what we call The Face. It is rather indescribable. Not many of you have seen The Face, and it hasn't really yet been captured on camera, because The Face is often fleeting and the owner of The Face is a bit of a spaz. The Face may actually be more difficult to capture on film than, say, a charging wildebeest in the Serengeti. Perhaps we should call in National Geographic.

The Face consists of a whole lot of eye bugging and mouth opening—mouth opening so wide that the corners of the mouth are strained and could split. The Face is often accompanied by excited twitching and sometimes by arm flapping and shrieking. It is a sight to behold.

Inga was privileged enough to witness The Face this weekend when Doug presented Harrison with his first ball—a mini soccer ball. You're just getting him a ball now, you ask? Now you'd think that finding a child a ball would be a relatively easy task, but it's not! Infant-friendly balls do not exist—not at babysrus, toysrus, kbtoys, kmart, target, or walmart! The closest we could find to a baby-sized ball was a dog ball that was meat flavored, and we weren't that desperate. Toys that are not battery-operated and constructed to produce a deafening, irritating electronic cacophony are hard to come by. What's the world coming to, folks, when it takes you 9 months to locate a goddamned ball for your child?

But I digress—Inga, Doug, and I started rolling the ball to Harrison, who, because he's a genius, figured out right away the object of the game and rolled it right back to us. And then my beautiful child's face was morphed into the most extreme, ugly, and hilarious version of The Face Doug and I have ever seen. And he did it EVERY TIME he rolled the ball.

I will do my best to capture The Face on film. In the meantime, you can get an idea of what it looks like below. It's like this. Only with more eye bugging. And mouth gaping. And twitching.