Stealth Jew

My toddler is still awake.

In fact, he is in good spirits. He is wearing a polo shirt, a diaper, cowboy boots, and three strings of Mardi Gras beads. He's alternating his attention between eating scrambled egg and playing with three toy dragons. He is babbling to his teddy bear as he plays. It would all be idiosyncratic and adorable if he were someone else's child, or if it were not quite so close to midnight.

I have discerned something critical about my children. It is that they are trying to starve me to death. I don't know why I didn't cotton on before now. In utero, they make me vomit everything. Once born, whenever I sit down with some food they want to eat it out of my dish.

Toddler recently ate everything on my plate but was still hungry. His plate was untouched and thus full of food. He tipped his plate out onto my plate, then ate the food. I think this may be some sort of monkey/gorilla/reptile brain way of making sure that I don't want him to starve.

Last night, I had a vivid nightmare. I heard thunder getting ever-closer to our house. I saw the figure of a person at the window in our bedroom, trying to get in. I was experiencing sleep paralysis and couldn't move. I started screaming, "Husband, help me, help me." Owing, I suppose, to the sleep paralysis, this apparently came out as "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" Either way, he ran in. The three children had piled on top of him and caused him to retreat to one of their beds.

He was very good natured about the entire business: First he is exiled to the land of Spiderman sheets, and then he is dragged back because his wife "had a bad dream."

At this point, Munchkin poked up her curly head from where she was sleeping at the end of the master bed and started crying. She said she was upset that no one ever called for _her_ when they had had a bad dream.

Genome woke up for perhaps ten seconds, raised one eyebrow at me, and went back to sleep. Apparently mummy crying out in the middle of the night is not the kind of thing that my sons consider worthy of investigation.

The next day, I asked Munchkin about something an adult had said to her. She said, "I don't know. I wasn't listening. Everyone thought I was listening, but I wasn't really. Really, I was singing a song silently in my head, and I was listening to that."

This actually explains a great deal.