Usually at night when we are done the bedtime routine with the kids and after we’ve raided any candy bowls or cupboards with chip-crumbs or anything else we’ve denied the kids access to during the day, I sneak back into the kid’s rooms to check for a) breathing, b) profuse sweating, c) that children are in the rooms we agreed in the parent-child sleep contract they should be in.
Most nights I find Ellie first sound asleep, upside down and backwards in a position no other human has ever in the history of the universe found comfortable or in any way acceptable for sleeping. It’s like she starts to get ready to curl up into bed but falls asleep before that ever happens.
Then I peek into Hanna’s room. It’s the same scene each and every night. There’s a bright light shining onto a page in a book she’s holding and she’s wearing a leopard-print bathrobe. If it was 1975 and the book was a trashy magazine, you would have to take a second look to be sure it wasn’t Helen Roper from Three’s Company.
Chloe is always a question mark-rarely asleep, always mischievous, never reading. In fact, when we do read, she’s quick to say, “Instead of the words, let’s point at the spider on every page.” Thank you Mercer Mayer for drawing a spider on every page.
She could be doing any number of things. There was a two-week span when she spent her time building pyramids of stuffies on Ellie’s face and giggled to herself when Ellie suffocated just long enough to be startled by a long-monkey’s arm blind-folding her.
Last night she called down to me, “Mommy, what time is my dance class tomorrow?”
“I have to do some research about signing you up for dance class Chloe.”
“Well do it now. Do it online. Okay? Are you online?” I was. I am. I am not looking at dance class registration options. I am looking at how to add another day to the week, preferably between Saturday and Sunday if I’m dreaming.
Then I tip-toed down the hall minutes later expecting everyone to be asleep.
Ellie was asleep in a deep lunge/triangle pose, Helen was reading and Chloe was lying on her back with a stack of books on her feet, “Hey Mommy, do you wanna do sit-ups?”
Good-night.
