Daddy and More Molars

    Yesterday in the car on the way back from the gym, Clara wanted to talk about Daddy.
    "Mommy," she said.
    "Yes?"
    "Daddy."
    And over and over, I told her, "Daddy is at work, but he'll be home later."
    Then it occurred to me that maybe she was looking for more information.
    "Daddy might be in a meeting right now.  A meeting is where lots of people come into a room with Daddy, and they all talk together.  The people say, 'Daddy, do you have that proposal we talked about last week?' And Daddy says, 'Yes, it's here in my pocket.'"
     There was silence as Clara seemed to consider this.  Then,
    "Mommy."
    "Yes."
    "Daddy."
    "Then he has his lunch, a sandwich and a banana, at his desk.  Then all of a sudden, engineers and project managers start calling him.  They say, 'Daddy, we want our project proposals!  We want our project proposals! And Daddy says, 'Hold your horses, Engineers!'"
    I saw a flash of pearly baby teeth in the rearview mirror as Clara grinned.  She likes horses, I think, and she really likes phones.
    Now, as I write this, it occurs to me that Clara wanted to talk to Simon on the phone.  It's something we do from time to time while we're driving somewhere.  We do speaker phone or bluetooth.

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     Last night Clara woke at 1:30 a.m.  It wasn't surprising; for the last several nights she's woken up repeatedly because her molars are coming in. Simon and I had agreed before we went to bed last night that we'd let her cry for awhile, to see if she'd go back to sleep on her own.
     She cried and cried, and yelled, and cried some more.  Finally, maybe forty minutes later, her cries got the muffled sound that lets us know she's laid back down in her crib and put her head down.
     I drifted off.  I thought I heard her crying again, and then she stopped.  I woke with a start at 3:30 a.m. because she was yelling, "Mommy!" from her crib.
     "Has she been crying for two hours and I just slept through it?" I wondered.  I went to her room, gave her some acetaminophen, breastfed her, and laid her back down.
     My alarm went off at 5:45 a.m., but just a minute or two before it did, Clara woke up and started yelling again.
     She was very relieved to see me, and even a little cheerful.  I brought her into the bathroom while I got ready for work, and ran her a warm bath.  She hadn't eaten a lot the day before, so I got her a chocolate cookie from the kitchen and some mango slices.  She filled an empty shampoo bottle over and over with bathwater and dumped it.
     Finally, when it was time for me to leave, I got her out of the water and wrapped her in the softest towel I could find.  Her body was rosy and warm from the bath.
     I put her back in her jammies and brought her into our room so she could snuggle with Simon.
     "Shhhhh," she said, pointing to Simon's slumbering form on the bed.
   
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     I stopped by the grocery store on the way home from work to get some ham for sandwiches and chocolate milk to ply Clara with.  I was pretty hungry, and looking forward to ham on wheat with some mayo and cheese.  Maybe some cilantro and fresh tomatoes, too.
     When I got home, Simon told me he hadn't been able to get Clara to eat anything since waking because her mouth hurt too badly.  I made her a scrambled egg with cheese and ketchup, which is one of her favorites.  But she only took one bite.  She sat in her booster seat looking at me with eyes like two burnt holes in a blanket (to steal a phrase from Little House on the Prairie).
     I gave her some teething medicine.  Then I took her upstairs to her room and wrapped her in a snuggly blanket and rocked her for a long time.  She was so exhausted and overwrought that her body twitched and jolted on its swift descent into sleep.  She hadn't fallen asleep that violently since Christmas, when we'd spent the day visiting relatives and she'd willfully skipped both her morning and afternoon naps.
     As I rocked, I remembered that I was hungry.  I couldn't yell down to Simon to bring me a snack because it would wake Clara.  I wished for a telepathic robot to bring me a ham sandwich and my laptop with some headphones so I could watch a movie while I rocked Clara.  Also a heating pad for my feet.