Front Seat
“Toonie you ate! I am SO HAPPY you ate!”
Singing Clean Up Pick Up Put Away from Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.
Ess didn’t have a change of clothes, so here she is in an old outfit of mine. She’s holding Greenie, the toothbrush.
It’s 9:21 in the evening, and since it is nearly the longest day of the year, I can look out our open window and see the green grass and tree leaves in the slowly fading twilight. Dads and Grads — my favorite time of the year. The time when the days are longest and summer still feels like all possibility and nothing spent.
I was out at continuing education tonight, learning about our current opioid epidemic, and I got home just before Essie’s bedtime. She and Mykala were upstairs in our bedroom, reading some stories when I got in the door. I ran up the stairs and I could hear this little voice going “dada! dada!” and when I opened the door, Ess ran up to me and gave me this GIANT hug. Then she asked me to read her this library book:
“Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to you. Happy Birthday to Dada…” is what I heard Ess singing in her pack and play on the morning of my birthday. She and Mykala sang it again later that day, and we drew with chalk on the sidewalk. Mykala baked a yellow cake (one of my favorites), and frosted a birthday greeting on the top of it. I visited my parents, and the sun was out for the first time in a few days. I tripled my age and got 96; I looked back and realized I started at my current job when I was only 27, and that Ess was born when I was 29. I recalled looking at my official birthday certificate when I was in college, and seeing my mom’s age at my birth: 29.
When we draw with chalk on the driveway, Ess doesn’t call it “drawing” or “coloring” — her preferred term is “chalkin’”.
“We’re chalkin’, Mama!”
“Ess, what do you want to do today?”
“I’m eat bear cereal all day long.”
It turns out that if you play the 1999 hit song “Say My Name” by Destiny’s Child to Ess while driving in the car, she’ll listen to it, and then ask you to play “Fooba Nane” again please. Then she’ll listen to it a few times in a row, and when the chorus says “Say ‘baby I love you’” she’ll go “no I LOVE YOU, Mama!” and it’ll become part of driving.
I thought it might be fun to occasionally write down which library books we’ve checked out and are reading to Ess. This is the current stack on our nightstand:
Ess went through a big “Pete the Cat” phase; now that she has those two books just about memorized, she is moving on to other things. (That’s good, because we have to return these books to the library soon.) There’s a call and response in those two Pete the Cat books:
It’s easy to breeze through the times when Ess is happy, to let her play on her own when she’s content. There are always adult things to be done: cleaning, bill-paying, paperwork, planning, reading pieces on politics, philosophy, coding… and I have noticed I tend to conflate the important tasks with the urgent tasks. I can usually complete the urgent ones while Ess plays, but with that momentum I find I am sailing into important things and then… not very important things.
At the library, Ess found a toy stethoscope. Listening to its heartbeat sounds, she asked me what it was called and I told her.
Later on she declared that she’s going to have to use the check-up-scope to make sure her stuffed penguin was OK.
Check-up-scope.
“PEANUT!” Ess exclaimed ecstatically from the back seat of the car.
Our confusion gave way to realization: Ess had chewed through to the middle her of apple and saw its seeds.
Some things we eat, some things we don’t.
When the music ends, since it is usually playing from a music library or a streaming radio station, Ess expects another piece to begin playing:
“‘nother hong coming!”
She says it to Mykala, she says it to me. It’s very sweet. I do not recall her once getting upset when we couldn’t make another song start playing. It might be the only thing Ess feels particularly patient about right now. Our very toddlery toddler.
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