doot.
Oh, the agonized howling of waking up from a second nap.
By now it’s 3:30 or 4 in the afternoon and Chicken cannot believe he has to wake up AGAIN.
I go into his room and there is his face, wrinkled, pink, unfriendly, scowling out from between the bars of his crib. Hi
s hair, damp with sweat, riots in random tufts around his face.
He looks insane.
Or like he just lost a headlock fight in an attic in Phoenix.
He rips out his binky and hurls it back into the crib with a little “DOOT!” of effort.
This is the noise he makes when working really hard on something. I hand him a disposable camera that I STILL haven't had developed since 2010, and all we hear is “Doot doot doot doot,” for the next 20 minutes as he turns the mystery trinket over and over, charging the flash, winding the little wheel, shaking it, putting the tiny pads of his fingers in every crease and chanting his focus word.
Doot.
It doesn’t sound like the noise a growing brain would make. It doesn’t sound like the wonder it is.
Doot.
In all honesty, we don’t think about wonder when he wakes from the second nap. It’s straight to the snack chair for a post-nap blood sugar bump.
But in a few minutes, the miracle will rise like a full moon. He’ll be settled in his corner, on his blanket in his chair, one hand wrapped around a hunk of warm cheese, the other buried under the folds of the blanket.
Who knows what he’s cramming down there, or how deep. All I know is, I’d happily scrape a thousand years of snacks from the upholstery.
It’s a small price to pay for the person who gets to witness the miracle of a hand, a brain, an eye, a cheek, a throat, a tongue, rising up together to declare to the world, “I may be small but I am mighty.”
Doot.