Babyhair and bedtime reading

One corner of the fitted sheet is on the bed. I tuck the second, move to the third as both kids barrel into the room - I get out “don’t -” before they dive under the sheet. They roll around, laughing, kicking their feet. I set aside how late it is, the stuff I still have to do once they go to bed, my desire to finish the task I had almost finished, and I just appreciate how much fun they are having with each other and a simple thing like a billowing bed sheet.

Okay, what I really do is mutter “god damn it” a few times and try not to grit my teeth or let any of my exasperation out in my tone of voice. “Okay girls,” I’m trying to be level headed and even-toned here, “pretty soon you need to come out from under there so I can finish putting the sheet on. Plus it’s time to start stories for bed time.”

My wife walks in. My kids pop the sheet off the corners of the bed, one, two, three. “Hey!” I say, and I like myself a little less as I hear that parental scolding tone in my voice. That adds more to my annoyance. “It’s time to be done here.” They either don’t hear me or don’t care. I am now full on pissed. I look at my wife who has the gall, the nerve, frankly the fucked up sense of priorities to stand there smiling enjoying our children’s carefree play. Doesn’t she understand that beds need sheets?! How did I marry this woman? “I’m done for now.” I stand up, walk to the kitchen, pour a glass of cold water, drink it, and begin filling the sink with warm water and dish soap. I put my headphones in, click play. The Copyrights shout “you always sleep better when you don’t have any dreams” while I wash and rinse dishes. I do that for a few minutes until there’s shouting from another room. I turn the water and the iPod off, listen.

I can hear that my wife’s reading to our older one, at the beginning of the scenic route to bedtime and I can hear that the wheels keep falling off, so that trek is not making any forward motion. I set down the iPod and walk to the other room, peek around the corner of the doorway. Our younger one keeps climbing onto her mom and her sister’s backs and shoulders, attempting to scale to the tops of their heads, or leaning backward onto them, draping her full weight onto their upper bodies and blocking the book. I’m not proud but I skulk back to the kitchen to lean against the sink full of dishes and pick up this book I’ve been reading.

The author’s in the middle of a very funny bit about nursing her newborn who kept making the author flash people when my wife shouts “Nate! Can you take her please?”

“Yup! Here I come.” I set my book down on top of the microwave, walk toward the bedroom, turn around, walk back into the kitchen, grab my book, and set it on a shelf in the living room while on my way to the bedroom.

The littler one skulks behind her mom and her sister’s clouds of curly hair, eyeing me and squinting, mouth expressionless. Her body is crouched slightly, a building-up-potential-energy posture, ready to pounce or to bolt.
“Come here little one!” I hold out my arms.
“Book! Mama!”
“I’ll read you a book.”
“No! Mama!”
“Okay. I’m going to go look for squirrels. By myself. No one can come with me. You stay here. Don’t come with me.” She stands up and walks past me.

The kind of super simple reverse psychology that works with some little kids sometimes is almost embarrassing. On the other hand, my older kid is hella contrarian and I sometimes worry I’ve cultivated that by over-use of reverse psychology. That’s probably just paranoia on my part (another flaw I worry I’ll pass on) and the thing that’s actually made her a contrarian is the fact that I’m one. She’ll probably grow up to be insufferable, like her dad.

I scoop the littler one up from behind and point out the window.
“Let’s look for squirrels.”
“Squirr!” We have a bird-feeder out our window. We’ve seen chickadees, blue jays, cardinals, juncos, starlings, downy woodpeckers, pileated woodpeckers, crested titmice (I always want to call them ‘mice tits’), nuthatches, finches, mourning doves, robins, squirrels, and deer (they eat the birdseed right out of the feeder, which is cute when we catch them, and annoying when they do it at night so we wake up all out of birdseed and so are birdless). If this list seems dull to you, well, my kids like birds. Anything that holds their attention for a few moments is great, and anything that is mildly interesting to me that distracts them is even more so. I sort of made a choice to think it was cool to see lots of different kinds of birds because the only other option was to have it be yet another thing that I roll my eyes at, and my eyeroll muscles get tired as it is.
Earlier today we’d watched squirrels scaling the pole up to the birdfeeder and leaping to it. “Where are the squirrels now?”
“Squirr!”
“Are they sleeping?”
“Seep!”
“Where do you think they’re sleeping?”
“Bed!”
“They’re sleeping in bed?
“Bed!”
“Where are their beds?”
“Tree!”
“The squirrels are in bed in a tree?”
“Uh huh. Seep.”
“The squirrels are asleep in bed in a tree?”
“Uh huh.”
“How about if we pretend to be sleeping squirrels in our bed?”

Our bed, because this one sleeps in the bed with my wife and me. It’s great because she goes back to sleep faster, and makes it less likely we’ll make the mistake of changing our mind about the decision to stop at two kids.
“Uh huh!”
“Let’s race!”
“Race!”
I shuffle my feet, “I’m gonna win-”
“Win!”
“- because I’m so fast!”
“Fast!” she runs ahead of me, that toddler run that’s almost like falling with every step.

When my older kid first started walking and then running I worried she’d actually fall. I don’t worry about that really at all with the littler one. I guess I trust her equilibrium more. But I love it so much, that falling forward motion, the little kidness, the babytude of it.
She climbs into the bed, I follow her. I lay down, she sits next to me.
“I’m a squirrel in my bed in the tree. I’m going to go to sleep.”
“Seep.”
“I can’t sleep. Could you snuggle me to help me sleep?”
She lays across my chest. I kiss the top of her head. She’s small for her age and her hair has grown slowly. She’s never had a haircut and the hair she has is whispy, fine. Baby hair. I breathe in through my nose, she still smells like a baby.
When I was ten or thirteen or fifteen my mom used to say she wanted another baby because of how they smelled. I thought that was stupid because she was so clearly overwhelmed by two having my two toddler brothers, plus me, plus a bad second marriage, and I just didn’t get the baby smell thing. Now I totally do. If we have another one it will be that damn smell that does it, and the softness of their hair. It will be those two qualities of the final product that wrecks my resolve to stop at two, way more than anything that occurs during the process of baby production.

“Seep. Now.”
“Okay, I’m asleep.” I close my eyes. She makes a sound sort of like a whistling “sshh sshh,” her imitation of my imitation of snoring. I do the same.
She sits up. “Wake!”
“Oh!” I sit up. “You woke me up!” She laughs, I feel warm inside my chest, on my face.
“Seep.”
“Okay. Snuggle me to help me sleep.”
“Snuggle.” She says it sort of like “snug-oh” or “snug-ooh” or “snug-aww” because ‘L’s evade her. Babyish again. Love it. I nuzzle the top of her head, breathe that smell. She fake snores. Me too.

“Wake!”
“Oh! You woke me up!” She laughs again, then covers hey eyes.
“Where did you go?”
She laughs.
“Where are you? You were just here!”
“Sad.”
“Boo hoo hoo I am so sad! My little girl was here but not where did she go? I am so sad, I miss her!”
She takes her hands off her eyes.
“You came back!” She smiles. “I missed you!”
“Hide,” she explains, “hide eyes.”
“Yes, you were hiding by covering your eyes.”
She does it again, we repeat the game, and again.
“Hide eyes.”
“That’s right.”
“Sad.”
“Yes, Daddy was sad when you were gone.”
“Saired.”
“Scared?”
“Uh huh.”
“Daddy was scared when you were gone?”
“Uh huh.”
“Yes I was scared, I didn’t know where you were.” Her smile broadens. I think she likes the control this gives her.
“Angry.”
“Was Daddy angry when you were gone?”
“Angry. Mad.”
“I got mad that I couldn’t find you?”
“Mad. Sad. Saired.”
“Yes I was.”

Does she know those are my actual feelings most of the time? Am I that easy to read? And if so, why is she smiling about it? Little psycho.
I kiss her forehead. She covers her eyes, we repeat the game again. She stands up. “Done.”
“We’re done with that game?”
“Done. Mama.”
“You want to see Mama?”
“Uh huh.” She toddles back to the room where my wife and other daughter are reading. I lay in bed for a minute, savoring the chance to stretch out by myself for a second. My older daughter shouts “HEY!”, I jump up (well, I rise into a lunge, grunting, knee popping… listen kids, #ItGetsWorse) and I walk to the back bedroom where my younger is again attempting to lay across the shoulders of my wife and older daughter. “Take her OUT of here!” With just her voice my older kid conveys the sound of someone stamping a foot. I walk out of the room and to the kitchen, put on a song on the iPod that I often play when I try to dance the littler one to sleep. I walk back into the back bedroom and my younger comes running toward me.
“Aww! You want to dance with Daddy!” my wife says.

I pick my daughter up, carry her to the kitchen. She presses her forehead into my collarbone, babyhair again on my cheek, that smell, and I sing her about half the song. She sits upright, arches her back away from me.
“Mama. Nurse. Down.”
I keep singing and swaying, trying to lure her back to peacefully dancing with me, maybe she’ll fall asleep. “DOWN! NOW!” I am sure that when it’s time for me to dance and sing with my older daughter for a few minutes then the younger will demand to dance with me again. I set her down, she runs back to the bedtime reading room.
“Nurse! Nursey!” my younger shouts.
“I’ll nurse you after I finish this book with your sister,” my wife says, “I can’t have both of you and a book in my lap and we have get your sister to bed.”

I walk back into the room. My younger one wraps her hands around her mom’s forearm. I pick her up. She cries, “no! Mama! nursey!”, the cry builds to a howl as I carry her into the kitchen again then she stops, looks me in the eye, tears streaming and nose running and she is silent sobbing, the kind of thing my kids mostly only do when they faceplant, the really serious distress crying that comes just before wails of genuine physical pain.
“Silent cry? Really?” She continues, breathing shallow, fast, wetly through her mouth, mouth corners turned as far down as they’ll go, lower lip stuck out fat like a nightcrawler on the sidewalk after hard rain. “Silent crying over being with me instead of mama? Is it really that bad?” The silent cry ends, loud sobs now.

I try to distract her by talking about squirrels again, deer, poop, pee, diapers… I don’t remember what else. In the film of my memory, in this scene my lines are drowned out by her crying. I try to pull her into my chest for a comforting hug but that’s not anything she’s interested in. She arches her back again, leaning her heart and head away from me. Whatever that does to her center of gravity, it makes me feel her weight a lot more in my lower back. I give up, press my lips into a line, breathe slowly through my nose and just hold her in my arms while she cries. A minute or so later, feels like at least five though, my wife comes into the room, takes our daughter, “I can nurse her, we’re done with stories.”

Our older walks into the room, “I wanna dance with you.” While we do she wraps her legs around my ribcage and I zip her inside my hoodie. She leans her head on my neck and puts her arms in my sweatshirt. I lurch side to side, what I call dancing, and sing my off-key renditions of Weakerthans songs. I crane my neck and look out of the corner of my eye to see her face. Her eyelids flutter and close.