A temperature of 100.8 ℉ with a chance of vomit, not worthy of a trip to Urgent Care but bad enough to force a change in my plans. Dubsie and I are on our own this weekend, with Mummy away on a business trip, and Friday night I wanted to sneak baby over to see a flick at a friend’s house. Hell, it was probably a bad idea anyway.
I’d wanted this weekend to be me and Dubsie against the world. But now with her sick, it would be me and Dubsie against the pillow. I put her into bed next to me and she tossed and turned, breathing like a snotty Darth Vader. I’d roll her into the middle of the bed and wake up an hour later with her hot little head wedged under mine.
Dubsie woke up unhappy at 4 a.m., and again at 5 a.m., and at 7 a.m. she woke up with a full diaper and I knew that I would wring no more sleep out of her. The day stretched out long and featureless.
I’d clung to the hope that she would have recuperated so I could meet some friends at Dubsie’s 10 a.m. music class. At 9:30 a.m., Dubsie finished the last bites of a snack and promptly fell asleep on my shoulder. No music class. But at least she was asleep. I slid Dubsie into her bed with a fervent wish that this would be a long winter’s nap so Daddy could knock some things off his list. Forty-five minutes later, I heard Dubsie’s little fists clanking the bars of her baby gate.
So, books. Dubsie absolutely loves them. “Reed-a-boooook!” is her constant refrain. We read three books during lunch, then another four books. That got us to almost 11 a.m. Then we moved on to crayons. Dubsie is new to crayons and finds them exciting, but in the way that Art History majors like art; she prefers to watch. She enjoys watching Daddy draw bicycles and triangles and Mickey Mouse, and asks for more, but she will only scribble when prodded. After drawing my third bicycle with the orange crayon, I had notions of branching out into some other colors, maybe a green or a bold purple. But Dubsie had decided that all the non-orange crayons were exclusively hers and that no one could touch them.
I taught myself to play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” on guitar, but Dubsie wouldn’t sing along. I slung Dubsie’s drum around her neck and grabbed a tambourine so we could make a parade, but she flung away her drumsticks. We repaired to her room to see what toys I could find there. She has one of those Leapfrog puzzles where you’re supposed to match the back and front half of the barnyard animal and it plays a special song, but it seemed like the front halves of the animals had disappeared. Mostly we just had pig and duck butts. I resisted the urge to check my watch again, since that would only reinforce how slowly the day was crawling. I went downstairs and found this pamphlet we got from the doctor’s office about games to play with 20- to 24-month-old toddlers.
“Put small containers, spoons, measuring cups, funnels, a bucket, shovels, and a colander into a sandbox,” the sheet said. We have no sandbox. There’s a good playground a few blocks away, but it’s 40 degrees outside and the kid is sick.
“Use plastic farm animals or stuffed animals to tell the Old McDonald story. Use sound effects!” Lame.
“Hide a loudly ticking clock or a softly playing transistor radio in a room and have your child find it. Take turns by letting him hide and you find.” Brilliant!
I’d never tried playing hide and seek with Dubsie before. I activated the public-radio app on my phone (who has a transistor radio any more?) and hid it behind her baby toilet in the bathroom. “Where’s the radio? Dubsie, where’s the radio? Find it! Find it!” I shouted with more than a little desperation. She looked confused, and made a halfhearted effort to see where the noise was coming from, but she didn’t really see the point. I hid the phone three times and found it for her three times. Then I yelled “your turn!” and told her to hide it, and covered by eyes with my hands and slowly counted to ten. When I opened them, she stood in front of me with my phone aloft, with an expression that said here’s that phone you keep losing.
Half an hour later we sat together in the middle of the room surrounded by a rubble of toys. For the record, she was happy – a slightly dazed child content to be doing nothing in particular — but I was bored out of my mind. I could no longer keep my eyes open. I kept drifting off with a plastic doodad in my hand, my chin falling on my chest, but felt an urgency to snap out of it, like I was falling asleep at the wheel of fathering. I snuck downstairs to make myself a cup of coffee. I wondered why it is that I have no problem being alert at work all week, doing abstract, computer-y stuff that no one will care about a week from now, but couldn’t keep my eyes open when taking care of my own child for a few hours on a Saturday.
So back downstairs to read more books. We worked our way though the bestsellers of Gyo Fujikawa and into the secondary catalog of Sandra Boynton. Only now, reading books no longer felt like an edifying, educational activity. It felt more akin to popping in a video, or some other cheap trick to pass the time. I recited from pages I have read dozens of times before, blinking to keep myself awake and pitying Dubsie for having a father who lacks the joie de vivre to think up something more creative to do.
One of Dubsie’s go-to words these days is ‘tuck — stuck — and she uses it to mean anything that isn’t working, whether a sticker from Trader Joe’s that is welded to her high-chair tray to a hand she can’t get out of her sleeve on the changing table. That’s right, Dubsie, Daddy is ‘tuck today, and there’s no getting out of this one.
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