Margo à la Maude

I mentioned before that with Margo's cold, which now seems to be gone, she has been crying out in the middle of the night. If she doesn't fall back to sleep in a reasonable amount of time, we go to check on her and calm her down. She's usually on her knees, hands on the bars of the crib, crying like a wrongfully accused prisoner. All she needs is the tin cup to rake across the cell bars. Or a harmonica. Yeah, I bet you she's more of a harmonica-style jailbird than the riot-prone troublemaker. I guess only time will tell.

That doesn't mean that we only check on her when she cries. Throughout the evening, we pop in to make sure that she's covered and in a good state.

Here's the thing: when we put her to bed, it looks like this diagram.

Multiple covers, squared away. She usually welcomes getting covered up with the knit blankets, hooking her two teeth into the various weaves and biting and yanking at them, smiling and giggling. (Yeah, I don't really get it either, but whatever works). Once the last cover is on her, I bring out Minou, her stuffed cat, and she bursts into laughter. Then she quiets down and contemplates the meaning of life, and I leave her.

Usually, by the next time we check on her, the scenario is more like this:

Blankets all askew, Margo tucked into herself in one of the two top corners of the crib, huddled in a sort-of crawling position, as if her batteries had run out and she just collapsed. Minou is usually face down, punished for doing toe-heel-toe-skip instead of toe-heel-toe-sweep in the tapdance scene of the Broadway (re: off-off-off Broadway) play Shawshank Redemption: the Musical that Margo has been directing. Punished, but never too far away from where Margo has ended up.

How does this happen? Is she comfortable? Is she warm enough? Is there a solution? All questions that have plagued humanity since the dawn of six months, three weeks ago.

The best part of bedtime, though, is when she wakes us up in the morning, crying, and then lights up when she sees one of us coming into her room, bending/quasi-jumping in place like a chimp whose handler has brought in a bunch of bananas. And as we bend over to pick us up, she sweetly looks up at us, and puts her arms into position to be picked up. What a kid!

- Michel (someday, I will learn not to use similes late at night when I'm not thinking straight)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 03, 2007 at 11:17 p.m.. You can skip to the end and leave a response.