After being a very short-tempered, unpleasant person for the past several weeks to do winter entrapment in my house, I decided I would attempt a day out with Lilah yesterday. The wind-chill had been hovering around 20 degrees below zero for almost a week, so I refused to take my daughter out, no matter how well she was bundled, unless absolutely necessary. During said week, the sun would shine deceptively and hatefully through my window, and not even the faintest of breezes whispered through the frozen branches of the trees. I'd test the waters by getting the mail while Lilah napped, and I never even made it to the back porch without snapping my eyes closed and letting several expletives fly inside my head before turning around and coming back inside. It was so cold, breathing itself was painful. Not cool.
Yesterday was supposed to be between 15 and 20 degrees above zero, so I decided to take Lilah...somewhere. We were both crazed with cabin fever and had to get out. Our plan of action was to drop Dano off at school and head to the library to kill a half-hour or so until the UP Children's Museum opened, and we'd spend a few hours there. We didn't have to get up any earlier, as Lilah (having tricked us by sleeping in until 10:00 the first 6 months of her life) is now always bright-eyed and bushy-tailed by 8:00. I fed her a bowl of oatmeal in the car and took my coffee with me so no time had to be wasted on breakfast.
I sat in the car looking at the stately building looming ahead of me and found myself almost dreading it. Bratty, loud kids we could work around, but it was the moms, always the moms, that made me want to grind my teeth to nubs. Telling myself we were just killing some time, we passed through the glass doors and made our way to the lowest level which housed the coffee shop and Children's Area. The air there smelled of something warm and comforting, and curry. I glanced into the coffee shop as we passed it. The chalkboard sign read, "Soup of the Day: Curried Squash". That explained it.
The first thing I noticed upon entering the Children's Area was the silence. No shrieks, no mindless chatter, no crying, no impatient voices. The only sound I could hear was the aquarium filter. The librarian looked up from her desk and smiled at us, and I genuinely smiled right back. The sun was just barely up, and the morning light filtered through the glass ceiling, creating streams of light here and there. Lilah stared at the bright room in awe. I got her out of her car seat and set her down in the middle of the floor. She looked at me for permission and I smiled at her. Then she took off crawling so fast I couldn't see limbs, just a blur of brown leggings and the folds of her pink linen dress flapping.
She spent a good 20 minutes just crawling as fast as her legs could go, occasionally looking back to make sure I was still smiling at her (my daughter, like all girl babies, is exceptionally good at reading faces. Oftentimes I don't even have to tell her "no". She can tell by my expression she should back away or turn around. This has been studied extensively, and is also why girls tend to be people-pleasers). After that, I showed her that there were actual toys and things to play with in addition to wide open crawling spaces. She loved the train table (although keeping the public toys out of her mouth was a daunting and sometimes impossible task) and had a lot of fun knocking over towers we made out of the wooden blocks. She destroyed the kitchen set and spent a good deal of time banging metal pots and pans together. We read stories and she wove through the bookshelves, playing peek-a-boo around corners. She discovered the fish tank and sat on the tiny chair in front of it for quite a while, tracing fish with her fingers and saying, "Cat!" Any animal is, apparently, a cat. She crawled to the giant stuffed Paddington Bear and laughed at him, clambering into his lap and pulling his floppy red hat over his eyes. I think she was trying to play peek-a-boo, but she quickly lost interest when he didn't seem enthusiastic about playing.
After almost an hour, another woman and three small boys joined us. She was very friendly and looked/acted like a normal person. I quickly regretted thinking to myself that one of the younger boys was behind in his speech development - he talked how my nephew Ephraim did when he was barely 2!. She told me her boys were 5 and 2 but very tall for their age, and she babysat the other 2 year old. I would have guessed him to be at least 4! The boys played blocks and trains, and the woman talked to me. Not fake soccer mom talk. She actually talked to me. And I talked to her. Lilah seemed delighted with the company and even crawled over to her and touched her, giggling. The only negative part of the experience was one of the little boys taking every toy Lilah attempted to put in her mouth (all of them) so she wouldn't "get germs". I thought it was cute and thoughtful. Lilah Rose did not.
They only stayed for an hour, and then we had the place to ourselves. At one point, another mom came in with a 5 or 6 year old. She stayed on her laptop and he read to himself quietly. Lilah got a little crabby, so I nursed her, and she fell asleep in my arms. I wrapped her in a blanket and grabbed a book for myself from the fiction section upstairs. I read for 45 undisturbed minutes before heading to pick Dano up. My mood and outlook were improved 100 fold; Lilah was so exhausted she woke up to eat her lunch and went back to sleep for another 2 hours; Dano was just happy his girls were not psychotic any longer. We never even made it to the Children's Museum, but we just might give the library another try. We're 1 for 3.
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