The Occasional Angel in Him...

Every now and then my boyish, Gochar-obsessed, eyeball-consumed, rude-joke-making 3 year old surprises me with such maternal tenderness I secretly wonder if it’s not the ghost of my wonderful Grandma coming back to haunt me by eerily warping my son into a replica of herself.

Thank heavens his hair doesn’t turn orange and his teeth fall out in the process.

Whatever it is, that comes over my son, it has happened TWICE over the past 24 hours and both times it blew my socks off.

Yesterday, after a particularly FANTASTIC WEEKEND with my Thunder Bay Peeps, we arrived home EXHAUSTED and, shortly after putting Mia down for her afternoon nap, I, being the very best parent I could be at the time, threw a mini temper tantrum and put myself to bed, leaving Rob and Toby to fend for themselves for an hour. (Or two and a half it turned out to be…)

Rob is not quite so obvious as I am.

I awoke from my uninterrupted hour (s) of bliss to find the house EERILY quiet.

You know that kind of quiet. The one where you realize there are either 2 kids, a dog and another adult all tied up and gagged in a bathroom somewhere or they are all dead. It is somewhat similar to reaching the very top of a rollercoaster and hearing the final CLICK and PAUSE before you perilously plummet down the giant hill at break neck speeds.

I leapt out of bed.

To my surprise, I arrived in the basement to find a sleeping Rob on the couch and a smugly contented Toby sitting at his desk colouring. Not seconds after I entered the room (rather loudly, I might add) did Toby leap up and announce in as loud a whisper as he could muster,

“SHHHH!!! Mommy!!!! Daddy is SLEEPING. I sang him a song and he went to sleep!”

He threw his little hands up in surprise and then went back to colouring.

Quick check to see if Rob was dead – he wasn’t. Then back to Toby to clarify the situation.

It took the rest of the day to piece together what exactly DID happen in the 20 minutes before my descent into the basement. Taking Toby’s innocent 3-year-old version and Rob’s poor-pre-sleep memory, it turns out Toby DID in fact sing Rob to sleep on the couch. The last thing Rob remembers is “a very BAD version of a Christmas song” followed by the familiar question, “Was that a good song, daddy?” accompanied by some light stroking of Rob’s hair by his delicate little fingers and off to sleep Rob went.

Toby, feeling rather proud of himself, sat down and actually played on his own for a grand totally of 7 minutes.

And just to polish off his halo, this afternoon, after an impromptu pick up at daycare, I had to resort to giving a famished Toby the ONLY snack I could find, which happened to be a (I am embarrassed to say this – please don’t judge me all of you healthy, home baked moms out there…) processed package of mini oatmeal raisin cookies.

OK, FINE, they were oatmeal chocolate chip.

Plus or minus the oatmeal.

Toby LOVED them. Used to the usual snack of raisins or apples that Dad brings with him on his regularly scheduled pick up, this was a HOME RUN. The ride out of the parking lot of daycare was the quietest one in history; he had gobbled them all up by the time I was turning out of the parking lot. All except for one, that is.

He held this little mini cookie in his hand and looked at it longingly as he announced with as much will power and determination as he could muster, “Mommy. I am going to save this cookie and give it to Daddy when I get home.”

I told him that that was a VERY nice thing for him to do while secretly believing that the lone last cookie was in all likelihood NOT going to survive the rest of the trip home.

I was wrong.

It wasn’t easy for him. Toby sat and stared at his little fist that clutched the mini cookie the entire way home. At one point he sighed and asked, “Mommy…sometime can you make me some MORE of these?” (Oh, Mr. Christie, how good a mom you make me seem…)

Finally we got home and by then even my OWN willpower was coming into question. I neglected the array of stethoscopes, daycare paintings, dirty tupperware containers and outdoor attire that needed to be carried into the house and quickly got Toby out first and into the house so he could hand over this precious lone surviving cookie to his lucky father.

Setting back to work at emptying the front and back seat of the car, I entered the house 2 minutes later. There wasn’t a trace of the cookie left. Toby was struggling to get his boots off and Rob was chasing Mia around the house.

“Did Toby give you the cookie?” I asked accusingly to Rob.

“Yeah.” Said Rob cavalierly. “And I ate it.”

If only he knew…