Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Mommy in the Middle

MeiMei does not seem to be acquiring spoken language terribly quickly, but she gets her point across. The other night she sat up in bed, pointed at me cuddling JieJie and shook her head angrily while miming rocking a baby. She is not getting enough cuddles from mommy in the "family bed," itself a concept that I considered completely misguided when I first encountered it on "Six Feet Under." Once there was a scared and lonely first child in our lives, the family bed seemed imperative and the quote marks fell away.

JieJie craved physical closeness and still does. We called her the heat-seeking missile when she was a baby. When MeiMei came home, we tried briefly to keep her in the crib, inches from the bed, but it did not seem fair to put her behind the bars with JieJie snuggled between us.

JieJie won't budge from her spot. MeiMei bonded with Daddy first, and she remains a Daddy's girl, but she will dive away from his embrace in a heartbeat to engage in a kicking and poking fight over the prime space next to mommy. MeiMei's message is loud and clear. Time for mommy to sleep in the middle.

Mommy Moment: I found the Netflix that have been missing for what must be a few weeks. They are on my desk. I checked the Netflix site. They seem to have been mailed here in December. Time to quit Netflix?