The night
Middle of October is here, the cold weather is finally in Nashville, if only for a day or two. The sun’s light is at this weird angle where the world looks like a bad early 90’s TV show about a sax-playing cop standing on a nightclub.
Both kids went to bed at a semi-reasonable hour. This is an oddity because Maggie (4.5) want to stay awake to infinity, and baby (2) does whatever she wants and lately that’s pretending to go night night and then bursting out of the room and demanding hugs.
Maggie’s been building up a lot of night fears. Monsters, witches, various dreams about holes with unknown things in them. We’ve responded with introducing her to monsters, showing her that witches (the evil kind,) get defeated in movies, and an attempt to get over the fear that a video about “monster island” instilled of holes. But she went down without much of a fight last night.
I haven’t slept a full night for a while. Something always wakes me up at about two AM and involves a trip or two up and down the stairs to take care of something. Last night it was Aerin saying “daddy I peed.” I asked her where and she said “I peed in the diaper and the bed.” I took care of this, getting new sheets out and making her bed, changing her diaper, getting different pants.
I presented her with a fresh bed and she climbed in and waved at me and said “night night daddy.” I tucked her in, handed her a fresh bottle of milk, and went to bed.
Wait a second.
Unfortunately I’d done this on auto pilot or I would have realized that Aerin doesn’t say sentences past two words. I lay there racking my brain to decide if I was remembering incorrectly and considered going downstairs to see if she would say more than two words for anything, but she was fast asleep on the baby monitor.
Not only did I remember her saying a three word sentence, she chained a sentence together.
Or I dreamed the whole thing. Well, not the whole thing. The sheets were changed as well as baby. I tried talking to her a little this morning but she wasn’t particularly in the mood to talk when waking up.
About the time we shipped her off to daycare it sounded like she was up to three word sentences but one was a nonsense word.
Maggie and I rode in in a fogged up car, were late for school again but managed to make it before the woman showed up who makes you being 2 minutes late for school an 8 minute late for school ordeal. She’s four and a half now and worried now about people dying now that it’s daylight.
I asked her to worry about something else that I knew was going to happen. I believe it was stopping at a light. I asked her if all her worry for this did anything to change the light or if it just caused her to waste two minutes of her time.
Trying to teach her that worry doesn’t help and only hurts, but we’ll see how that goes.
It was a cold October day… it’ll be 79f in a couple of days.
