And That's At Two In The Morning, Folks

Early this morning, as happens most mornings, Lope woke me up to tell me something about Veda. Usually it's that she's hungry, or fussy, or needs to be changed (Veda, not Lope), so this time I figured was in one of those categories too.

This assumption turned out to be greatly helpful to me, since Penny phrased it in a way I hadn't heard before.

(Whispering in the dark) "Babe... I think she's ready to eat." (This part was normal.) "...I'd change her first, so it's smooth sailing."

I stood up from the bed and started feeling my way over to the bassinet, simultaneously trying to wake myself up and decipher what Lope had just said. It was hard to hear in hushed-baby tones, you know, and there was no chance of lipreading or anything, and besides I had only been awake for about a second and a half when she said it.

My best guess was that she said "moose ailing," which was an interesting topic for Lope to bring up in the middle of the night, but my groggy brain soon pieced it all together:

Veda had been cooing and grunting in her sleep like she does, making little noises preceding actual cries of hunger. And tonight, for whatever reason, those noises sounded to Lope like a, well, like an ailing moose.

I can see why you'd want to notify your spouse about that. (Though I'll admit I had no idea what I was supposed to do about it.)

A couple more steps toward the bassinet, though, in the room in the dark in the middle of the night, my theory started to fall apart.

What does Lope even know about moose sounds? She grew up north of where I did, I'll grant you, but not in the tundra, I don't believe. And I seriously doubt she had much exposure to moose or their sounds — certainly not enough to identify them in her sleep.

Besides, it wouldn't be like Lope to compare Veda to anything unflattering. I remembered getting glared at for likening the little one to a baby dragon, just yesterday in fact, and Lope calling our daughter a moose just seemed way out of the question.

So I started cross-referencing similar phrases and sounds. Lope's tooth is wailing, perhaps? A broken filling or other dental emergency would be bad indeed, but it would also be awfully colorful phrasing for 2 a.m., and probably would have been whispered with a little more severity.

Our youth is failing? It's true that I'm getting a little round in the midsection, yes, but surely she'd prefer to talk about that some other time.

She wants me to buy her a ukelele? No, that can't be it. That was *me* that wanted a uke. We talked about it the other day.

None of my theories were panning out.

Finally I got it: Smooth sailing. Of course. She was advising me to change Veda's diaper before giving her the bottle, so that after the little one fell asleep during the feeding we could go straight back to bed. That made a lot more sense. I was pretty pleased with myself for my half-awake detective work.

Still, though, once I had changed the diaper and fed the bean and rocked her back to sleep and deposited her safely back up in her bed, I couldn't stop thinking about my initial idea as I lay there in the dark.

Veda making sounds like a moose ailing. What would that even be like?