a tiny tug at my heart

This is one of those moments I try to record somewhere, just to be able to remember it for longer than an hour. It's a bit sentimental, but still sweet.

Meris is bouncing on my bed while I nurse Matea. He stops, sits up, looks at me and says, “You know what Risa said when we were outside?”
“What?”
“She said, ‘No following.’”
“Were you running around after her?” (Ariel had mentioned that Meris was playing by himself, trying to join various groups of kids when he arrived at the park to pick him up from school. So I guessed that Risa was part of one of those groups.)
“How did you feel about that?”
“Sad.” Pause. “I’m still sad.”
Conversation goes on for a little while. Meris is lying (laying?) on his stomach, facing me. At some point, he props his chin in both hands and pats his frowning little cheeks.
We talk about which kids are his friends. “Simone is your friend, right?”
“Yeah, Simone is my friend. But she is only one friend.”
“Sometimes it’s fun to have one friend you play with a lot.”
“No, I want to have a lot of friends.” By now, he’s laying on his back.
He climbs off the bed, and basically gets moving again while we talk. I must say something about he wanted to play with Risa, because the discussion ends when he says, “Because she [Risa] is cool and great.”
So it begins.

Also today, we were reading a counting book with lots of flaps that you lift. Meris clearly is learning to recognize the numbers from 11 to 20, but hasn’t quite mastered them. One page has pictures of tiny objects on the flap, with the numeral printed underneath. Meris randomly opens them and reads the numbers. “Fourteen, sixteen, eighteen, nineteen, threeteen.” I interrupt and correct him. He moves his hand one flap to the left, lifts it, and looks at me as he says, “Twoteen?” I can’t help but laugh a little. So cute.