Evening Routine, April 2021

6:35

After dinner, my wife or I have the responsibility of getting our daughter and her “oogy googy” hands up to the bathtub. Depending upon the meal, and how comparatively nice one of us is dressed, one of us bites the bullet to start the evening routine.

Once our daughter is in the bathroom. she quickly runs to turn the hot water spout on the tub, while I turn on the cold one and plug the drain. Now it’s time to get nakey-nakey, and while I help with her shirt, she manages to a way to kick off the fused amalgamation of her pants and diaper across the room herself. Once I’ve put in three pumps of bubble bath and swished my hand around in the water to make the bubbles form, she’ll climb in the tub.

Mommy takes over and watches her for most of the bath, sometimes from afar but these days, in the tub with her. I’ll go down and clean the kitchen, or as much of a dent I can in the fifteen minutes or so of free time I have to do so. On good nights, the surfaces will be clean enough to hit with a spray: apple orchard for the granite, grapefruit for the table. These days, I’ll feel content just getting the dishwasher fill enough to run. It feels pointless trying to keep up.

6:52

At some point I’ll hear a chorus singing from the upstairs hallway, in unison singing “heyyyyyyy Daddy JAY-ake”. I’ll walk upstairs and pick up some nighttime clothes before approaching the master bathroom.

I hesitate at the threshold of the door to the bathroom. Sometimes, I will wave my hand in—with a thumbs up gesture or a devil horns—or sometimes I’ll protrude my butt and dance such that from the bathtub it looks like a disembodied phantom posterior is wiggling from the bedroom. My daughter laughs and laughs and hides her head behind a Peppa Pig bucket and exclaims I’m not to see me anywhere! while hiding from the ghost butt.

I walk in and sprawl out a large towel onto the floor and state that “its time for the baby burrito” On the harder nights, she’ll appeal to her mom from between her legs, pleading to stay in a bit longer. Eventually, she will relent by vaulting herself over the bathtub and curl herself into the fetal position on the floor, letting me fold the towel around her for a brief moment to soak up the water.

In a flash, she hops up and beelines to the toilet. She puts down the seat and pulls the training seat off the of the nearby hook and gargoyles herself on top of it until she can sit properly. While she once perched on it more easily using a stool, she now insists “that’s for the bathtub” and that this is the way moving forward.

Whether she “goes” or not, after a couple of minutes, she’ll expectantly ask two candies?! These days, we just give her the one, and every time we do, we get interrogated on it: What color is that? It’s green! Oh. What letter is that? It’s an M No, it’s an O! (Presumably, the shape of the mini M&M is an O).

If she does that on the potty, we always say five candies are up for grabs. Five candies?!?! She laughs it off. It’s too ridiculous an amount of candies to even wrap your head around.

7:00

Mommy gets out of the bath and heads into the shower while I put my on daughters nighttime clothes, eventually leaving to give Mommy some space and continue the nightly routine.

We walk into the guest bathroom and she immediately gets in the guest shower/tub. I fold the unicorn toothpaste tube to eke out a shiny, sparkling button of paste onto the toothbrush. It gets harder and harder each night, as it’s mostly empty from the multiple times she’s snuck into the bathroom to drink it without us noticing.

I hand the anointed toothbrush to Fiona and she exclaims lets hide, presumably from Mommy who is showering with wall between us. We climb into the guest bathtub and she covertly brushes her teeth in a thicket of a white and gold shower curtain, as I stand barefoot in the tub next to her, checking my phone.

Our patience is too thin to actually wait for mom to finish her shower to scare her, so we play hide-and-seek instead. My daughter stays in the tub and counts to ten, and I quickly dart into her room, hiding in one of four places: in the closet, behind the door, behind the changing table, or under the blanket. Sometimes I will put her oversized toy deer underneath her blanket and hide in the other room, to really throw her off her game. We’ll repeat this game 3 or 4 times, always ending with a triumphant I found you and a playful punch in the leg.

7:15

Around this time, Mommy joins us, draped in baby burrito towel from earlier. We are already hidden under my daughters blanket, shushing one another so we don’t betray our cover to Mommy. After laughing and laughing, my daughter crawls out and continues the façade in a different manner, asking Mommy hm, where is Daddy Jake? He must be in the tunnel. After I’ve emerged from said tunnel, she laughs and laughs.

Mommy and I coax her into bed by bringing out the “First Days of School” word book. It is not a book with a plot; rather, it is a book of labeled pictures, sometimes with British-isms like “Crisps”, “Plimsolls”, and “Maths Words”.

On the first page, she wants us to read “shoes, boots, a hat, a jacket” as fast as we can. Then she points to a picture of a book that’s a tiny replica of the very book we are reading. That’s like the end book

On the second page, we point to a picture of a woman pushing a boy on a tricycle, which is an uncanny representation of her best friend and his mom from the neighborhood. We point to the cartoon mom’s blue purse (which is also blue in real life) and ask “What’s in here?” Trucks, just like in real life.

Next, we read the entire alphabet printed on a series of tiles on the fourth page, at whatever pace she traces her hand across the letters on the page. The O is my favorite she declares, perhaps with the taste of a mini M&M still lingering. Since there are three lines of nine letters each, there’s a single blank tile after Z. Somebody put a blank one she announces, we need another letter.

The next page is for colors and it features little ink blots in each hue. Somebody spilled on the page! They spilled Red, Yellow, Green, Pink...”When she correctly identifies them all, she claps and yells good job! for herself. Underneath the colors, she tells us, These are called shapes. The circle? That’s my favorite shape. The triangle, apparently, is our favorite shape.

By the time we reach the page about lunch time, she’s tired and wants us to do the labeling. On the next page with storybook creatures, she runs her finger up and down the bottom row, demanding faster as we exaggeratedly spew the line-up of, “King, Queen, Princess, Prince, Fairy Godmother.” On the last page, we review the actions of the day as the little cartoon boy goes through the motions, ending with: bath time, bed time. She mimics the boy in the book, grabbing a blankie and her stuffed flamingo, and posing like he does in a stage-yawn.

7:30

Before we can leave her for the night, we have to do “Two Minutes”. Typically Mommy does it, but sometimes I do it, but regardless, one of us theatrically asks Siri to set a timer for two minutes and lay down on the floor next to her while she lays in bed.

The room is clean, probably the cleanest room in the house, without a dirty sock or Seek-and-Find magazine out of place. The closet is closed, the dresser drawers are latched, and all of the “friends” are in bed with her. I am laying on a thin, furry white carpet looking at the ceiling fan lazily spin above.

It’s perfectly still and quiet, save for the lazy whir of the fan and the shuffling of a tiny body in sheets next to me. It’s the first time all day I’ve been in my own headspace about anything. Her bedroom is as vessel catapulting across the universe at unfathomable speeds and we exist in a stasis, lost and safe.

Sometimes, we list off everybody in the neighborhood that constitutes her universe: the boy in the book, the mom with the trucks, every friend, every dog and every parent. Sometimes, she’ll ask to hold my hand. Sometimes I will, and I’ll hold it so tight I worry I might crush it into dust. Sometimes she will hand me her foot to hold, joking that this is my hand and laugh and laugh.

7:32

The alarm goes off. While the fibers of the carpet pull at my body, yearning me to stay laying, I force myself to sit up and lean over the bed that holds my daughter. I tell her shes “the most special-ist girl in the whole wide world”—a similar sentiment thing my dad expressed to me every night no matter how late he got home and no matter how stale his breath was. She says “I love you daddy Jake”. After an embrace, I get up off the floor and exit the room.