So yesterday, as I sat down to write, a button popped off the side of my wireless keyboard and the batteries slid out. Okay, I figured out quickly. It needs new batteries. So I replaced them, but I couldn't get it to work, and although I opened every file on the hard drive in a desperate attempt to make the thing functional, no dice. The message on the screen said I needed to make sure the keyboard was "turned on," but the keyboard itself is so sleek and streamlined that I couldn't imagine how this would be done--there was nothing to switch. Until this morning, I took another look and realized that on one side there was a flat button that looked like the top of a screw. I pressed it: a light went on, and suddenly the message on the screen disappeared. So today I have been able to write, although I am not going to post what I have been working on until later. Instead, a little interlude, if you will. But because of my equipment glitch, today I will post twice.
This is what Lily thinks happens when she goes to sleep: The door of her room closes, and I immediately start dancing around the apartment in glee with Annika. We both sit in the middle of the living room rug surrounded by sweets--cookies, candy, ice cream bars, as well as potato chips and gum, mountains of gum. And juice boxes. Towers of them. Then, we turn on the television and watch shows with superheroes in them and that sponge character that is featured prominently in the window of the bakery and who she knows I think is not really appropriate for kids--unless they're nine months old and her substantially younger sister, in which case, bring it on, sponge man. Then, we have a very gratifying conversation about how funny it is that Annika gets to stay up later than Lily even though Lily is substantially older, and how nice it is that we get to have this special, sugar-fueled, one-on-one time without any four-year-olds around to muck up the works.
No, she knows that is not what happens when her bedroom door closes behind me, mostly because she gets up and peeks out to check up on me. This may be what she dreams happens, but I know what she really thinks. She thinks I stand at the kitchen counter eating all of the food I have hidden from her: the cookies on top of the fridge, the chocolate in the top rack of the freezer, the chips at the back of the highest shelf. She thinks I order take-out food with white not brown rice and no vegetables and drink carbonated beverages and watch television shows that are not for children or lie in the reclining chair with a magazine that is less than six months old or the choice sections of last Sunday's New York Times or try to catch a little snooze before sitting back down at my computer, and most of all pretending, for an hour or two, that time will stretch out like it used to and bend back when I'm ready.
This is, indeed, what happens.
3 comments:
mmm. that sounds pretty good.
I can actually top this with a story of friends of ours. There is a group of us who are huge Star Wars fans (yes, I admit it, though I lay no claim to the prequels. They were awful.) Anyway, our friends Greg and Jen have an eight year old boy and he grew up on Star Wars because his father loved it so much. So one day about two years ago (when he was six), it was their friend's birthday. This (adult) friend was also a Star Wars fan. He came over to their house for a celebratory dinner. And one of the birthday presents he was given was a state of the art replica of a light saber. Later, after the (then) six year old had gone to bed, the adults pulled out the light sabers and were messing around with them, laughing and eating some of the birthday cake. Until a small voice interrupted them with "Dad, I can't sleep." And they turned and saw the HORROR on their kid's face as he realized that the grown-ups did, in fact, play Star Wars and eat cake once he had gone to bed.
I find it a minor miracle that they can get him to go to sleep at all anymore.
After the demise of a two pound bag of chocolate chips at the hands of a marauding teenager, I started secreting the packages in different locations around the house. The first hiding place lasted a few months. I’m over a year with my current spot. Only now, when my daughter wants to makes cookies and must be evicted from the room while I tiptoe to the drawer to retrieve the chips, I’m not without chagrin. After all, who do you think taught her to eat them?
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