Warms the Heart

Yesterday morning Claire was obviously tired and needed her morning nap. I tried several times to get her down, only to hear her rip the binkie from her mouth and begin fake-crying as I left the room. Oh that fake-cry brings back memories from my own childhood. I remember very distinctly fake-crying in order to get dad's attention, or something I wanted. I'm guessing hubby didn't have the fake-cry because he can't tell the difference between fake-cry and real-cry. And after roughly 30 seconds of fake-cry, he gives in and I happily pass on the title of "sucker" to him. Anyway, seeing that Claire was having nothing to do with napping, I tried a different approach.

We went into the living room and I placed her down on the ottoman, with me right beside her (at this point I so badly wanted her to nap because I was exhausted and I had no idea why). We played "high-five", signed the alphabet, sung songs... our usual. Then she started turning onto her side to look into my face, where she proceeded to grab my nose, mouth and occasionally an eye, which I luckily closed before she was able to grab my eyeball. This went back and forth for a few spells, until she did one final turn, looked me directly in the eyes, placed her hand on my cheek and went to sleep.

1...2...3... No eye peeping to check if I'm still there. ...4...5... Holy naps! She's actually sleeping.

Before I did my internal dance of joy, I just laid there there watching her sleep. My throat tightened and heart fluttered. Too precious. I didn't want to move her, but knew I had too--primarily for safety reasons. Of course, later that night, she made up for that sweet moment by becoming screeching cat on speed. Ahhh... babies.