Sunday, May 10, 2009

They're Back

Okay to tell you this mini story I must tell you something rather embarrassing about myself. I have this annoying little quark, where whenever I laugh unexpectedly or for a long time, I get hiccups. You know...the really hard kind that make your chest hurt.

Alex (my soon to be ex-husband) and I used to laugh together a lot. Usually because we were sharing our events of the day or our observations of others. I have a way of weaving a comical scenario and so does he, so we commonly laughed together. Every once in a while (more often than I'd like) I would laugh so hard that I would get hiccups, which would send Alex into an unsympathetic wave of laughter. Who could blame him for his jeering? I thought it was entertainment worthy myself.

Anyways, today my son was saying a simple phrase but he was testing out a new character voice while doing so. He was saying something about "the empire is at hand". It made me laugh so hard I began to hiccup. It was then that I realized I hadn't had the laughing hiccups in over a year. For whatever reason they had disappeared but now...for whatever reason they're back.

I'll take that as a good thing.

Cherish

A Sweet Moment


I had one of those "write about it" moments. You know, the kind of moment that you...uh write about? Here goes.

On Thanksgiving of 2007 my son and I were in Colorado Springs visiting my sister and her best friend, Chris. It was bedtime and I was desperately trying to get my son to get comfortable in a different bed, in a different house, in a different state where almost everybody he loved was awake and having fun in the other room. No dice. He cried and cried. I was about to cry myself because, at the time, things in my life were so overwhelmingly sad and my heart was broken. I prayed for wisdom and strength not to loose my temper or not to join him in his wailing. What came to mind was the song, "Baby of Mine" from the movie Dumbo. It was one of my favorite songs as a kid and my son had recently seen the movie.

I couldn't, for the life of me, remember the words but I hummed the tune anyway. In short order, he became silent. With the added soothing technique of stroking his hair he was calm, quiet, and sleeping in no time. Over the last year and a half the comfort of that song has meant a lot to the both of us. When I tired of singing the song, I tried to sing other things but my son would having nothing to do with those other songs. Instead, he insisted on "Baby of Mine".

We popped in a movie the other day which started with the music video of "Baby of Mine". He looked at me with glee on his face and said, "Mommy, that's the song you sing to me". Then he excitedly climbed up in my lap and rested his head on my shoulder while I stroked his hair and sang along. It was such a sweet moment. The look on his face was priceless. He didn't say it like this but what he meant was, "that is OUR song". And he just really wanted to be in my lap while it played. We played it over and over again. He rested in my lap until we were done. A simple melody brought us such a sweet moment.