Just Say Daddy!

Tom is relentless in his calling me. Right now the soundtrack to his life is  Momma! It’s really cute the way he calls me Momma. There’s always an urgency and a tinge of entitlement in his tone. 

What’s not cute though is how he always seems to call me for all the sucky stuff. I get called to clean up questionable goo and to  change bipers (diapers), as Tom calls them, or to  fish out crayons from the toilet. Daddy never gets summoned for anything. No,  he’s way too cool for that. 

Daddy’s there for fun stuff like  piggy back rides, jaunts  to Home Depot and hours spent pigging out on cheese crackers and  apple juice while watching Treehouse T.V.  Ok so I’ve done a good job ballyhooing your sympathies and the appropriate “Oh I know,” and “Go figure,”  and “Mom’s always the bad guy!” But the score was so wonderfully evened the other day. 

I’d had a rough time getting Tom to sleep. You know those times when no amount of singing and cooing and rubbing of backs and tummies and hugging and kissing will settle them down. He just would not go to sleep that day and I was at the point where I was tired and irritable myself. Usually when Tom has a hard time falling asleep he has a hard time staying asleep. I can expect to be get up 3 or 4 times throughout the night to soothe him back to sleep. At these times I always look over at Aleck blissfully asleep and  not making any attempts to take a turn at putting Tom back down, (even though his side of the bed is closest to the nursery-just saying!) 

One time Tom woke up in the middle of the night and Aleck nudged me and said  “Umm he’s calling you, I’d go but I don’t want to confuse him.” Really! Anyways that day at three in the a.m. my lovely Tom woke up to yell, “Daddy!” If you were listening in in my room you would have heard my giggle in the backdrop of Aleck’s shocked “What!” I turned over and nudged Aleck to say, “Umm he’s calling you, I’d go but I don’t want to confuse him!”