The morning started early - as Mandy mentioned earlier, Elliot's molars were keeping things lively last night, and Noah had had enough by a little after 6:00 AM.
You can always tell what kind of night your child has had with the first greeting of morning, sometimes with even the first look in their face. As I entered the room, I didn't get the usual "Good Morning Daddy!!" sweetness I'm used to and I could tell by the look on his face that he was still tired (as if I didn't already know it was coming by the number of times I put him back to sleep). No matter. He's up, I'm up - we're not going back to bed, now it's just a matter of limiting the collateral damage while others are still sleeping.
I could tell Mandy was getting Elliot back to sleep, so I tried to get him to tiptoe downstairs. Getting him to the bathroom for the first time each morning requires a negotiation process that I probably invest far too much into. No skin off my nose if he pees his pants, right? It would probably teach him a lesson. But, for whatever reason, I feel obligated to get him on the toilet for the first pee of the day. If you've ever seen
the scene Tom Hanks did in "A League of Their Own", you know how that goes.
Once that project is completed, Noah asks me to play with him, which normally is the saddest request I deal with every day. Most days, I am rushing off to work as he asks and begs, and I have to tell him why I can't stick around and read him a book/play hide and seek/watch Max and Ruby with him. Since I'm not rushing off to work today, I tell him "ok", much to his delight.
He decides we need to play "puzzles", and we put his Dora the Explorer puzzle together many times over the next half-hour or so. Sometimes he does it and I can occasionally give advice (which is wrong on its face - see "teenage years"), sometimes we "take turns", which means I start the puzzle, and he must finish it - my contributions during my turn are usually rejected within two or three puzzle pieces. This is fun for me, a rare treat; playing with him, and taking things at his pace, with no particular place to be is not something that happens often.
After a while, he says he is hungry, and asks me for pancakes - something I made him last weekend. I find being the provider of anything with sugary syrup on it probably puts you ahead of the game in the "popular parent" category. But since I enjoy making the boys breakfast, I oblige. Mandy brings Elliot downstairs as I'm making them, and I throw him into the mix and let her (futilely) attempt some more sleep. Elliot may not have many teeth yet, but he's sure not opposed to exposing the ones he does have to potential cavities through the syrup-laced pancakes.
At some point, Mandy gets back up and helps me get them ready for Gymboree (pronounced "Jamboree" by Noah), another activity I've missed out on lately by being too involved in work. Elliot, still teething, quickly makes friends of all the parents by slobbering on all of the toys/balls/slides in the place. By the time he's done, it looks like someone has walked around the room in wet socks.
We head to Lowes for some household maintenance items, with Noah asking me why I'm "looking at directions" - checking the GPS as I drive. I tell him a dozen different explanations, hoping one of them will keep him from asking again, but to no avail. Finally we get there, get our stuff and get home. On the way home, Elliot looks like he's getting ready to fall asleep. I've never been able to master Mandy's skill of getting him unbuckled from his car seat and into his crib without waking him up, so I desperately try to keep him awake. Mostly by throwing stuff back at him to play with - painter's tape, bottled water, my cell phone. At one point, I even prompt Noah to annoy his little brother.
It backfires. Usually I can get him to bed by walking him around, but today he's having none of it, and cries hysterically as I try to put him to sleep. I relent and bring him back down stairs to play until he's ready for nap time. Noah's not much better, and starts sobbing when Elliot somehow manages to change the channel of the show he's watching. In-con-sole-able. That boy desperately needs a nap too.
Mandy arrives just before I get halfway through my mental plans to run away from home, and saves the day. I take Noah to lunch at Chick-fil-A to get a "Chicken Parfait" (really a yogurt parfait). He spots the costumed Chick-fil-A cow and anxiously awaits his turn to high-five him as he makes the rounds, alternatively making kids' day and giving kids nightmares. I hear laughing and hysterical screaming wherever he goes.
Shortly after that we're on the road. I'm driving around, hoping that Noah will humor me in a rare act, and fall asleep for a nap at a reasonable hour. About five minutes later, he's asleep. I don't care how long he naps, just that he gets something in to make the rest of the day more bearable. I gas the car up, lay back my seat and join him for a brief doze in the parking lot. A half hour later, I arrive back at home, get him out of the car and fully expect him to wake up, but after setting him on the couch, he pulls a blanket over him and goes back to sleep until his brother wakes him up an hour later.
The boys and I go on bike and wagon rides in the rain, as Mandy runs a few more errands, and after most of a day of crying, whining, playing etc, we call Mandy's mom who graciously accepts an invitation to come over at the last minute and watch the boys while we decompress at a local sushi joint.
The unexpectedly biggest treat of the day comes when we put the boys to bed. Usually our routine is bathtime, then Mandy takes Elliot and puts him to bed, and I take Noah and read him stories and put him to bed. Noah almost never naps, since it becomes an almost-impossible job to get him to sleep at a reasonable hour, and tonight I started thinking his almost two hour nap might have been a bad idea.
As I start reading to him, he gets the giggles, and then the full-on laughs. He's jabbering a mile a minute as I'm trying to read him a book. I'm trying, without success, to keep him reasonably quiet while Elliot is going to sleep. Trying to keep him quiet is not unusual - Noah doesn't have an "inside" voice and an "outside" voice, he has a "loud" voice, and a "shouting-at-the-person-next-to-you-at-a-concert" level voice. But this time, he is just genuinely laughing his ass off, and it's hard not to get infected by the pure joy. Pretty soon, he's making me laugh too, and my efforts to quiet him lose what little credibility they had to begin with.
Finally, I pull him over to me, look in his face with a serious look, and tell him if he continues, I will have to quit reading and turn off the light and we'll have to go to bed. He's half smiling at me as I tell him this, and when I finish says, "But Daddy, you're so funny" and starts laughing again. It's not as funny in the retelling, but I started laughing too.
Later - much later - I ask him what his favorite part of the day was, as I do every night before bed. Usually he tells me something we (or he and Mandy) did during the day, but tonight he responds with a smile: "going to sleep".
Mine too.
