On middle-of-the-night snuggles & made-up songs

When one must linger

It’s been three nights in a row of waking up more than normal to breastfeed and settle a teething baby and to calm a feverish and sometimes fearful three-year-old. The lack of solid sleep shows up as I struggle to open my eyes any earlier than 8 a.m. Two babies into this parenting thing and I’ve learned how to prop my leg up just so on the nursery footstool so the baby is sandwiched between my side and my leg. My head tips back and rests on the wall as I try to catch a few winks of sleep. After a bit, I wake up. I gently take in her sweet features in the moonlight. I nuzzle my nose into her neck and breathe deeply, mouthing a prayer of thanks. I tuck her into bed before quietly padding into my own room and slipping under the covers where I drift off to a deep sleep.

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I’m parading two carts and two children all around the discount grocery store. I’m not choo-chooing like a train, but I may as well be for the way people smile and step aside at our rigmarole. We are doing a giant summer snack stock up and I’m throwing items into the cart as I cajole cranky children, trying not to twitch when the baby screeches. We make it to check-out where I’m whipping out my keys and sunglasses to try to distract her long enough to put my items on the conveyor belt and pay. I load up the bags into the cart as relief floods over me. "I’m either brave or foolish,” I wryly remark to the people behind me as I smile and start out the door.

In the parking lot, I take a swig of chocolate milk before handing it to my toddler. Angry that I took a sip first, she throws the closed bottle to the ground. As calmly as I can muster, I pick the bottle off the ground before plucking my child out of the cart and buckling her into her car seat so I can finish packing groceries into the car. The piercing screams of her tantrum exhaust me, but I keep going. “I think you’re brave,” a young man who observed the inside debacle tells me as he walks by my car, now witnessing the outside debacle as well. “I’m not sure about that, but at least I have snacks now!” I joke.

Sitting in the car, the girls quickly fall asleep. I dwell on the fact that despite the rough ending, I love watching the girls interact with people when we grocery shop. “What beautiful smiles they have,” an older gentleman had remarked.

//

The best way to hike with children is to be very good at making up games when little legs get exhausted. We stand on stumps and yell, “I’m the queen!” We practice finding the next trail marking on the tree ahead of us. I-Spy and “pick tiny flowers to press when we get home” teach us to notice miniscule things, to narrow our view.

Someday I’ll get to hike as fast as I did before, not limited to kid-sized paces, and I’ll look down to exclaim about the wonder of unfurling ferns and won’t have anyone to dawdle with.

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My toddler makes up songs constantly. It was just a few months ago that she walked around singing, “Jesus…my mommyyyyyyy…” but we’ve moved on to more lyrically complex songs now.

The baby signs “more” when she sees anyone with a can of sparkling water and opens and closes her fingers, her floppy wave quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Open-mouthed kisses & “Where are we going today?” greet me each morning.

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The campfire reduces itself to embers and the food has been tucked back in the house. Friends have bid farewell for the evening, and me? I throw my head back, staring at the starry night. Squinting to see if a star winked at me or it was all my imagination. “Let’s go in,” Luis tells me. But I resist, scooping up the whiffs of smoke and savoring these sacred moments like the last dreg of a perfectly made cup of coffee. And maybe, just maybe, I catch a glimpse of a shooting star dancing across the night sky.

//

Linger.

Not unlike the way my tongue forms around the word itself. The gentle lilt of the l. In the present. The guttural interruption of g. The softening once again of the er. Here I am, reluctant to leave these moments in the dust. I gently cup my hands to hold the present, the way water can be contained for mere moments or how I carefully observe lightning bugs before releasing once again.

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“It won't be like this for long, One day soon you'll drop her off, And she won't even know you're gone, This phase is gonna fly by, If you can just hold on, It won't be like this for long,” Darius Rucker croons in my brain.

I’m surrendering to the twenty-four hour rhythms I’ve been gifted with. Circadian.

The sun is on my face. Apricity.

My imagination is seeking invisible shapes and patterns. Pariedolia.

I throw my old patchwork quilt on the ground, settling in as the girls play. Linger.

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This post is part of a blog hop with Exhale—an online community of women pursuing creativity alongside motherhood, led by the writing team behind Coffee + Crumbs. Click here to view the next post in the series "Linger."