Strange Bedfellows

This weekend, the spherical frictionless family headed to my alma mater for my (eek) 20 year college reunion. I have no contact with anyone from my class at this point, don't have a strong urge to go back half a lifetime to find friends - mostly it became an excuse to go see how things have progressed in the little town that was my home away from home, lo these 20 years ago.

Friday night, we trundled everything through the pouring rain to the car and headed out, with Noah watching ICE AGE on a portable DVD player strapped to the back of spherical frictionless hubby's headrest, and we were off. An hour later, he peered at the dashboard and muttered "well, okay - we've gone 13 miles now."

It was a long drive.

Our hotel room turned out to be a frightening thing to a 2 year old, when we arrived there at 11:00 that night, but eventually we lured him to sleep in one full-size bed, while SFHubby and I attempted to fit into the other one, and woke each time Noah moved, to make sure he hadn't fallen down into the pit between the bed and the wall just big enough for a toddler to get wedged in. And attempted to remain silent, so we didn't wake him up.

And I listened to the rain pour on the hotel window, and thought "Oh dear God, if it rains all weekend and I've dragged them down here and we're stuck in this room for two days, they're going to torch me."

Morning dawned soggy and torential, but as we got showered, it seems there might be a break in the clouds, or was it wishful thinking? Hard to tell -- but my most vivid memories of college involve the constant but subtle worry that I was covered with a thin layer of mold, so it seems right somehow. We had a fabulous breakfast at my old pancake house haunt, and then made our way to campus to find out what they would do about the scheduled picnic, if the lawn had slid off the alumni house property and into the nearby stadium parking lot as we thought it might, arriving just in time to watch the parade, then stomp in puddles all over campus before the picnic -- and somehow during that time, it became a glorious and beautiful weekend.

But I'm not really here to talk about my reunion, which was mostly just silly, or the weekend, which was lovely -- I'm here to talk about sleeping with a two-year-old.

After dinner, where in his two-year-old way he forced us to eat at Hooter's, the only place we figured we didn't really CARE if he made a ruckus, we went back to the dreaded hotel room, where we began the arduous task of getting him to go to sleep in a strange place. In our pajamas, Noah and I cuddled up on one bed to watch the closest thing to childrens' television I could find, the latest Harry Potter movie, and SFHubby promptly fell asleep on the other. Eventually I realized that Noah wasn't used to a television on at bedtime, so I turned it off, and promptly fell asleep myself. I woke up half an hour later to a small hand patting my cheek, and a little voice insistantly saying "Mommy!"

"What?" I replied.

"Mommy!" More patting.

"Go to sleep!" I grumbled.

He cuddled back up to me and began rubbing my arm. All 800,000 BTUs of him, pressed firmly against my chest, fell alseep.

I lay there and sweated, and wondered if I could move my arm without waking him. I didn't need to worry, though, because I've learned one important thing. A toddler in sleep is a toddler in motion. He moved every 30 seconds for the next 8 solid hours, like a small toddler rotisserie, taking the bedclothes and pillows with him, and incrementally invading my half of the bed, micron by micron, for the rest of the night. Like a Mommy-seeking missile. Even when I moved to the other side of the bed, to get some space -- he did a 180 and went back into full pursuit. All the while, rubbing his little hot feet on the tops of my thighs. Patting my arm. Headbutting me on the mouth and leaving me with a knot the size of a tangerine in my lip at 11:00. Waking me again with his little hot feet on my face at 2am so that I'd remember to go change the clocks, so that I'd know exactly how early it was when he woke up, fully rested, at 5:30 am, and began suggesting that we "go home."

I stood for a long moment at the foot of the bed, right around 2am, and looked longingly from my husband, asleep diagonally on one bed, to my son, asleep diagonally on the other, and marveled that a 2-year-old can take up as much of a bed as a 48-year-old man, and nearly half as much as a well-trained cat. And thought about going to the car to get some actual sleep. And then thought, "you really don't get the chance very often to get those hot feet on your face in the middle of the night." And shoved him over and climbed back in for Round 2.

And when a little hand patted my face at 5:30 (thank you, end daylight savings time...) and a little voice said " Mommy! Breakfast!" I thought, MAN it's going to be a long day...." And then I knocked him over and tickled those little feet.

Which were, really, the best part of the entire weekend.

Where has the buddha-belly gone?

Two weeks ago, my son had a huge, fabulous, middle-aged-man-style buddha-belly that draped down over the front of his pants, so that you had to push it out of the way to snap his jeans closed. His 14-year-old brother had a nasty tendency to call him "fatty." He still had the little line of toddler fat-roll on his thigh.

And then, Sunday night before last, he got into the bathtub, and it was gone.

"Noah! Who has stolen your belly?" I demanded to know.

Little brown eyes looked back up at me in confusion.

"Your belly! Where's your belly?"

He pulled his tummy in -- this did not help things -- and pointed out his belly button for me. "Beebo?"

"Yes, it's your beebo, but where's your big buddha belly?"

Brown eyes, blinking.

Someone has stolen my son's buddha-belly. It's true. But in the last two weeks, his sleek two-and-almost-a-half-year-old self has gone shopping with me with no stroller, and has walked (WALKED!) all the way to the playground, and singlehandedly climbed the Very! Big! Hill!

I watched him run toward Very! Big! Hill! in his little jeans and enormous shoes and Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, and felt myself looking back at this moment from the sidelines of a soccer game sometime in the future, and watched the sheer gorgeousness of his little body running and little bell-clear voice laughing.

"Come ON, Mommy! Climb Very Big Hill!" Who could say no?