It was the middle of the night. I had already been up twice before this, finding and putting the binky back in Georgia’s mouth. This time, I couldn’t find it, and Georgia had put it on the mandatory list. I searched the crib between all the slats and then had to roughly wrestle it away from the wall. This was not an easy task, especially in a dark room and a tight space, while searching for a small plastic shape. Finding it would let me go back to sleep, and more importantly, it would quiet the fretful eight-month-old who had a drippy cold and who knew something was different because I wasn’t mama.
After the first night with Georgia, two more to come, I had learned a lot, and so had she. She grew a little more accustomed to Grandpa Jim, my ex, and me, and started smiling at us when we did our silly grandparent antics to try to get her to smile. Up until then, she had observed closely, looking back and forth between us, and then to her big brother, Harry. When he left for school in the mornings, she was on her own, without anyone to look to for context, until he came home in the afternoons. I had learned to recognize the early signs of hunger and started the bottle and bedtime routine before it escalated into a full-blown meltdown. Meltdowns turned her already runny nose into a marathon. And even more importantly than learning to read the signs, I learned to take a bowl full of clean pacifiers upstairs with me.
From Sunday afternoon to Wednesday, Jim and I used our parenting expertise learned from raising our own babies to keep our grandchildren alive. By the last day, we had it down. I was able to fend off most problems because I knew what the problems were by then. Jim and I had, without even trying, claimed certain tasks, though diaper changes were shared. We figured out that Georgia had an extended happy period after eating, so although she ate at the table with us for each meal, Jim would feed her first while she was sitting in the high chair. I would get the meal, and by the time our food was ready, we could eat it without interruption as she happily watched us and even participated in the conversation.
Also, Georgia had relaxed without Mom and Dad there because BROTHER (her inferred emphasis, not mine) was still around. When Harry got home from school, he would pick her up and flop her around clumsily. She felt important because he was paying attention to her. I think her cold had cleared a bit, too, and she was generally feeling better.
Late Wednesday afternoon, right before Mom and Dad were due back that evening, Jim says to me, “I don’t think I’d want to do this all the time.”
I laughed and said, “Yeah, that’s why you have babies when you’re young.”
Though I was exhausted and unsure of myself the first sleepless night, the other two nights went much better. I wasn’t fighting with binkies anymore, and I had the middle-of-the-night bottle prep down. I’m not sure Georgia needed the bottle the second and third nights because I popped the binkie back in when she fussed, and while I was preparing the bottle, I didn’t hear a thing from her. But I gave the bottle to her out of greed, my greed. I realized in the corner of her darkened room, in a comfortable chair, with her soft, warm, sweet-smelling, cuddly form in my arms, enhanced by satisfying sucking sounds, we melded into a little family for that moment. We, right then, were at the center of the universe.
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