The Milky One

I should say, in all fairness to Munchkin, that she has been, lately, a delight: charming, snuggly, hilarious, polite, smart, and co-operative. You know, because I tend to write posts when these conditions do not obtain.

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We have begun the singing of Christmas songs in the wind-down to bedtime. We are easing into the repertoire, but have begun with a doozy: Santa Claus is coming to town. The song is both melodically tricky (don't start too low: it gets a lot lower! Then goes up abruptly!) and plot-heavy (retelling, into baby ears, the basic parameters of the Kris Kringle contract: behave, and there will be toys. You are under constant surveillance!). Munchkin is rapt.

Monday, feeling limited by our two song rotation (Rudolph is the other guest of honour at our song banquet) I threw in the preamble to the Santa song: "I just got back from a lovely trip, along the Milky Way ... I stopped off at the North Pole, to have a holiday ...")

"No!" Munchkin shouted, "The Santa song!"

Last night, though, out of the blue (in the dark) she snuggled into my chest and asked in her sweetest voice, "Sing the milky one, Mama? The milky one?"

So I did. And lo and behold she knows all the words already and I think she's heard it twice. She hummed with me and popped the words in where she can.

I've written before about my singing. I have to say, two years later, I still love to sing to her. It brings me a lot of joy to sit in the dark with my girl, so big she hardly fits into my lap any more, to sing to her and with her, by request, songs that fill her imagination with dreams and her heart with the sound of my voice, echoing through my chest wall where she's pressed her head in tight. She pats my arm in time, I whisper in her ears and smell her hair.