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The little ones woke after longish, peaceful naps, and because they’d missed their baths the night before, I herded them directly into the tub.
During this one occasion, they stripped down without a fuss. They presented me with chubby little body parts to be washed on demand. They even splashed in a controlled manner.
As I watched them in the tub, things were calm enough that I could actually see their faces (as opposed to blond blurs of frantic activity). It had been a while since I’d truly looked at them; it amazes me how very much the boy looks like his father and the girl looks like her mother.
The boy’s resemblance is striking, but it’s absolutely eerie how much the girl favors her mother. She has her mother’s exact expressions, which seems unbelievable considering how little time they’ve spent face to face. How is it possible that she learned to move her eyebrows in the same way as her mother? How can she replicate so precisely the scorn of her mother’s emphatic “No!”?
Bath time over, they scooted downstairs with significantly less than the usual fuss. I set them and the eldest child up with snacks (nobody argued about my choices!) and got down to the business of fixing supper.
It was a night that the stb-ex would be coming over to spend time with the children, and it’s become my habit to fix a nice dinner for us to share on those nights. My mother is horrified that I cook dinner for him or that I’m even civil at all to him.
It’s usual for dinner preparations to be interrupted numerous times with shrieking requests to settle a dispute over who is the rightful owner of a toy that hadn’t seen daylight in six months until one person laid tiny grubby hands on it, at which time it transmogrified into the most precious thing ever.
But this dinner I was able to assemble in thirty minutes flat, without even the cat demanding attention. No one even spoke to me, not even when I had raw chicken on my hands, which usually prompts the most plaintive requests for immediate assistance.
Dinner was prepared so quickly and easily that I had time (not to mention mental energy) left over for a few rounds of “Itsy Bitsy Spider” before the stb-ex arrived home. This song is new to the little ones; they watched me make the spider climb as if my simple hand motions held the secrets of the universe.
See, it’s not all missed medication, dying cats and existential angst around here.
Newb Writer
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