Gem In The Morning

I was rummaging in the closet for a pair of pants and long sleeves. It was dark and barely 6am yet but the small fry had clutched her crotch and was whimpering in bed. When I asked her if she'd wanted to trash her diapers, she'd nodded.

I needed something else to dress her in; her one-piece pyjama suit does not enable a fast exit for wee-wee.

After fumbling around for what felt like eons, I decided to get a torchlight to help my search. I still couldn't find the sleeves I was looking for, so I settled for one which I thought was probably a little too small for her but would just have to do.

Not completely satisfied but too bleary to be picky, I stepped over to her mattress and asked her to lie still while I took off her diapers and applied the diaper rash cream. She'd never had much problems with nappy rash but a few days back, a few red spots had appeared and have been causing her grief.

Nappy rash cream, check. Pants, check. "OK, can you sit up so I can put this shirt on you?"

"Dowan, dowan." Her standard response for "What the hell are you thinking?!"

"But baby, it's cold outside and you need sleeves. And there's a nice pink flower on the front, see?"

"Dowan, dowan," accompanied by shaking of the head.

"But whyyyyyyyy?" I protested with a hint of a whine.

"Ffffsssst, hot, hot!" and she punctuates this statement with a frantic waving of her hand to denote touching a red hot coal and drawing it away from the searing heat, her standard motion for telling us something is hot. Oh, I forget, we taught her that.

Dawn is an hour away yet my daughter is lucid enough to try to explain to me she doesn't want to wear long sleeves because she's hot. If I weren't so bleary-eyed and sleepy from lack of sleep (couldn't fall to bed immediately last night; too many random thoughts in my head), I'd be jumping around, whooping for joy that her thought processes are mature enough that she'd try to get some sense into that thick head of mine. No, mummy, I don't want to wear that because I'm hot.

So I settled for the next best thing: I proudly told Jona about Sophie's little lucid explanation while I handed the small fry off to her for her morning milk and breakfast.

Marveling at the surprises the little one springs on me on a daily basis, I then stumbled back into bed.