The Toddler Chronicles, No. 10
Lyla woke me up around 0400 a few nights ago.
She was yelling for a new pull-up. It was a weird cry, like a whimper mixed with a bellow. She might have a future in theatre with how well she projects.
Anyway, I ran up to her room in a half-asleep stupor, opened the door, and whispered-yelled with all the grace and cadence of a drunken homeless person who was mildly inconvenienced at the shelter, “Shhhh! Charlotte is sleeping! What do you need?”
“I peed through my pull-up and now I’m all wet and everything is ruined!” She dramatically responded.
I picked her up and she was wet. I also did the classic blindly-feel-the-sheets-to-see-if-they’re-wet testing method for the bedding and sure enough, those were wet too.
It’s also worth noting that she wears a size 4T for her clothes, sometimes even a 5T. The pajamas she insisted on wearing that night were a 2T. It was a Halloween set with relatively anatomically-correct glow-in-the-dark bones on the torso and extremities and they were comedically small on her.
I helped her change her clothes and pull-up and since Charlotte was still asleep, I elected to deal with changing the bedding in the morning. Even though I had the demeanor of an inebriated homeless person, I couldn’t let her sleep like one (in a bed soaked with her own urine), so I brought her to my bed.
After she climbed into my bed and got tucked in she pointed at the TV on the wall with her whole arm and four fingers, just like how Disney teaches their employees to point, and said, “Can we watch a show now?”
I said, “No, it’s still dark outside and it’s still bedtime.”
She responded with, “But it’s only bedtime after the sun goes down and the moon comes up and I don’t see the moon…So we can watch a show now.”
I was a caught a little off guard by her logic, but after a beat I said, “Kiddo, you can’t see the moon right now because you’re inside the house. You can’t see outside at all. It’s still bedtime. Even the dogs are still sleeping.”
Those two animals were actively snoring on the other side of the bed. They didn’t budge through the whole process of me leaving and returning with another human. Such great guard dogs.
Undeterred, Lyla said, “Or we can watch a show anyway if you just turn on the TV…” and gestured with her whole arm and four fingers again.
I told her no and reiterated that it was still bedtime.
She pointed her index finger in the air and said, “Or we can sleep for just a little bit more and then watch a show,” like she had just came up with the idea to sleep on her own.
She then proceeded to ugly sleep for the next 5 hours.
I woke up twice to being kicked in the head and the torso by Lyla and then woke up a third and final time to being tea-bagged by a dog slowly stretch-climbing over me while getting off the bed to greet Gabby at the front door as she arrived home from work.