Recovered

I think we've recovered from Halloween. Candy recovery for Echo and cuteness recovery for me. 

Halloween is great in it's utter straight-forwardness. You dress up, you say "trick-or-treat" and you get candy. No history to learn, no religion to wind your way around, just costumes, sugar and friendly neighbors. Echo is almost never even outside at night let alone knocking on strange doors and then after, if that weren't strange enough, dumping a pile of candy onto the living room floor and EATING IT.

And we let her. She ate a few things, often stopping mid-treat to move on to something else. I watched her and the clock, and eventually cut her off and dropped her in bed, flushed cheeks, wide eyes and all. I scrubbed her teeth, read a few short books and she was asleep within milliseconds. But the next morning, which could hardly be called morning since there was no sign of the sun at all, the sugar was still with us. Echo writhed in the dark, pissed-off. The covers weren't quite right, my arm was in the way, Papa's pillow was encroaching, nothing was right. Often, under these circumstances Echo will wail NURSE! and seek comfort in a bit of milk at my breast, so I wasn't surprised when she started in, NNNNNNUUUUUUURRRR.... but she didn't say nurse, she said, NERDS!

Yes. My daughter now knows what Nerds are, she knows the delight of tiny lumps of sugar dyed with all sorts of chemicals and then packaged in a colorful box. She now knows of these and was screaming for them at six in the morning. Crap.

Sugar, in the old days, used to be kept in apothecaries, locked within a a cabinet with other toxic and addictive substances. Now it is handed out with glee, whole candy bars to near-infants. So there was that to recover from.

And then the cuteness. Echo was in a blue fuzzy suit. That alone was a lot for me to handle. I wanted to squeeze her until she popped, to eat her, or smoosh her or something. Then there was the wide-eyedness, the novelty, and her management of the practicalities. I saw her working out how to handle her pretend cookie, the candy basket, porch steps, shyness and spooky pumpkins. It was all so earnest and vulnerable I could barely stand it.

When, at one point, a lady handed Echo a Pixie stick, and Echo stared at it in wonder, stuck to the spot, her hand moving in slow motion for moments and moments while the adults stood, holding their breath, waiting for her to complete the transaction, I almost turned inside out. She is little, young. Young enough to not ever have seen such a treat. Young enough to not know about the timing of social interactions, that once you have received the treat you say Thank You in a recorded kind of way and move off. She is young enough to be slow in her wonder, silent in her studiousness, and intent on getting her bearings on a mysterious night.

My love for her in that Pixie stick moment was almost too much to bear.

But we've recovered.

Echo will eat candy today, but she didn't wake at dawn, her interest is no longer crazed, and her system has rid itself of the initial sugar onslaught. I will still be stunned by cuteness, in fact when I found Echo this morning with her head beneath the couch cushions, mourning the rip she inflicted upon her Winnie the Pooh sticker, I was momentarily paralyzed. But it was momentary. I didn't feel myself turning inside out, my heart stayed within it's confines. Perhaps the absence of a blue suit saved me.

These are battles we will fight forever. Sweets will always call our name and there will be other mornings when Echo suffers from over-indulgence. And I will always be at risk of dying from my love for my daughter, from her wonderfulness and red-cheeked cuteness.

Perhaps it's not such a bad thing. Maybe we would be lucky to stumble and recover, stumble and recover in this way, for the rest of our long lives.

 

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On Halloween night I heard my daughter say in her sleep "thank you," which could only have been tribute to the response I urged her to give each candy-offering household. "She's still trick or treating!" I told my husband.
ps: we're still nursing too, shhhhh