Chloe, our three year old has developed a peculiar new pastime.
After we have tucked the girls into bed, read stories, set fans, heaters or both, dimmed lights, installed timers on night-lights in hallways, awkwardly answered at least one question about how quickly a woman’s stomach reforms after giving birth, we say goodnight.
This is usually the time of the evening when some people would get lost in a great book, learn to speak Spanish, help the FBI find one of their most wanted criminals. Greg and I turn on the tv and argue over who has to make the popcorn.
It is during this transition phase that Chloe climbs out of her bed, wanders down the hall and plants herself in front of us to ask for some water, glitter glue, tiramisu. If there’s a stall tactic, she’s used it.
Either Greg or myself I then begrudgingly crawl out of the most perfectly shaped form of my body off of the leather cushions and walk Chloe back to her bed.
After about the third or fourth round, Chloe introduces a new character to her bag of tricks.
Invisible Chloe.
Invisible Chloe is a three year old child who Mummy-wrapped (head included) in her pink fuzzy blanket, wanders down the hall and then hovers somewhere behind us until one of us jumps out of our skin.
Invisible Chloe’s methods are so primary, they’re perfect.
If she can’t see us, we can’t see her. Simple.
Except last night, Greg and I were watching tv and we heard a series of pounding noises that sounded like someone wearing thick gloves was violently knocking on our front door.
We jumped up, popcorn flew everywhere and we heard a scream followed by a lot of tears.
Invisible Chloe had fallen down the stairs.
We had talked to Chloe about hurting herself by draping the blanket over her eyes. We feared she might walk into a wall or a doorway or even bump into a sharp corner of her dresser. It didn’t occur to us that she could fall down a flight of stairs.
Chloe cried, Greg and I held her, hands shaking, worried she had broken bones, a concussion or internal bleeding.
When she calmed down, we hugged her some more and checked her out before bringing her into our bed to sleep so we could keep an eye on her during the night.
She didn’t appear to be injured, just scared. Perhaps it was the thick blanket that protected her.
We talked a lot about how Invisible Chloe was no longer allowed and she agreed.
She did say, “We better get rid of those stairs,” right after, “Hey, do I smell popcorn?”
