We have gotten Dubsie in the habit of sleeping in her own room, but she doesn’t stay there. At 2 or 3 a.m. I hear the door open and find that she’s standing attentively at my bedside with a white rectangle in her hand. The rectangle is a fresh diaper. The one she’s wearing has gotten full, and she’s had the forethought to stop by her dresser on the way in and bring me a new one.
I reach out sleepily and feel her pajama bottoms for wetness. “Did you pee through?” I ask.
“No,” she says.
She’s correct, the pajamas are dry. We just need to replace the diaper. I help her wiggle her pants down to her ankles then undo the diaper clasps. It rolls onto the carpet with a dull sound. This diaper is enormous, bigger even than you would expect on a three-year-old at three in the morning. There’s a reason it’s so big. Dubsie’s night urinations are so ardent, and the proportions of her posterior so large, and so tired are her parents of changing the sheets, that we gave up on the diapers meant for ordinary children and ordered a jumbo pack of Adult Smalls, the kind used in nursing homes. We call them granny diapers.
I am groggy and would be fine with Granny lying on the floor until morning, but this seems to offend Dubsie’s sensibility. She picks it up by a corner and, with her pajamas around her ankles, drags it to the bathroom, places a foot on the step can, stuffs the wet diaper inside, and takes tiny mincing steps back to me, where I help her don the fresh diaper (which, if you’ll remember, she’s retrieved by herself in the dark), and lift her into our bed, where she sighs with relief at finding her tiny white pillow between our two adult ones.
And then my daughter wraps my arm in a bear hug, and services her Daddy back to sleep.
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