But that’s beside the point.

The point is that I don’t wear hose very often because A) they irritate me to death and B) I constantly snag them. I can look at hose from across a room and they snag. So I pretty much don’t wear them unless it’s super cold and/or I have to dress up. I wore them for the first time in front of Ladybug last week. Here’s what happened.

My beloved child rushed up to hug my legs, after all, we’d been separated about 20 minutes. She wrapped her arms around me and then dropped her arms and stepped back a good foot and a half. Ladybug’s face was confused and a bit fascinated. She looked at my legs curiously for a few seconds and then reached back to touch one of them again. She pulled her hand back super quick and looked up at me as if to say, “What’s going on here? Where’s your skin? This looks like skin but it’s not.” This went on for some time as I moved about the room finishing my dressing routine. I thought she was over it.

That afternoon when I picked her up from the babysitter’s house, again Ladybug touched my legs. When we got home, she kept touching them until I took the pantyhose off. Then she touched my real, live skin and a smile broke out on her face a mile wide. She clapped her hands together and grinned at me, completely thrilled that my legs were back and all was well with the world.

Today I wore black tights and she eyeballed me a bit but didn’t feel the need to do a pat down search again.

So yesterday afternoon I put myself to bed for a while. I’ve been struggling with allergies or a maybe it’s a head cold, for several days. The wretched disease worked its way into my eyeballs and they were burning and itching so badly I could barely keep them open.

While I was stretched out on the bed, in the darkened room, Ladybug “comforted” me. She carried babies back and forth to put beside me. She sang me songs. She brushed my hair and finally she read to me. Ladybug has a picture book Bible and from it she read the story of Noah’s Ark.

Here it is, according to Ladybug (imagine this in her little, toddler voice):
build boat
elephants and giraffes
raining
bird
dry
rainbow

Well, she hit all the highlights anyway.

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So maybe Ladybug listens to us after all.

Yesterday morning she tiptoed into our room at 7:09 a.m. I sensed her presence more than heard her. She stood about 1.5 inches from my head and breathed and tried to keep herself from giggling. I knew she was there but I didn’t want to wake up yet. She couldn’t take it and finally whispered, “Mom.” When I didn’t perk up, she said it again, “Mom.”

I opened an eyeball and stared at her but still didn’t speak. Once she had my attention, she was just all wiggly and bouncy and she said “Good morning!” 45 times or so.

She calmed down, realizing I wasn’t joining her enthusiastic greeting of the dawn. She pointed to my alarm clock and said, “one more minute” as I have I don’t know how many mornings. Then she sat on the floor, cross legged to wait.

Ladybug has one doll. She pulls her pants off, tucks her in under a little doll-sized quilt, kisses her face and points to her doll’s nose if asked where it is. (She assumes our short term memory is less than adequate, I think. She always looks at me curiously, sighs and then points AGAIN to the doll’s nose as if to say, “Mommy, it’s right HERE, right where it always is when you ask me. Good grief.”

The doll (who is nameless) lives downstairs in the family room toy box. Yesterday afternoon after playtime I announced it was time for supper. Ladybug jumped up and scurried to the staircase like usual but this time she was carrying her doll. When we mounted the stairs, Ladybug insisted on climbing them herself…while struggling to hold her dolly in her hand. I offered multiple times to carry it for her but she refused. So clutching her baby in one hand, she pulled herself along with the other one, bumping her chin on the steps several times, looking back at me to make sure I was following and dropping her beloved child now and then. Each time I thought she’d go on up without the doll but each time Ladybug stopped and went back for it until we made it all the way to the top. Then she stood up, doll in hand and raced to the high chair.

She and Dolly squirmed impatiently while I prepared her sippy cup of milk. I started piling food on Ladybug’s tray and she quickly realized something. She was out of space. Something had to go.

So despite all her efforts to carry that wild-haired, pink-wearing doll up the stairs…she literally tossed it over the side on to the floor where it landed with a sickening thud. I turned around from the stove to see her look down at it wistfully, then eyeball her fist full of rice and cram the entire thing into her mouth. “MMMMMM,” she said.

Again, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

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On the weekends, if she gets too far ahead of me, I scream out desperately to Michael who pops up to continue the chase while I collapse on the floor, gasping for air and drooling just a little bit. During the week, I’m on my own. Who has time to write when the computer is a mere blur of technology as we scamper by in hot pursuit of the cat or a ball or something I can’t see but which Ladybug can’t stop pointing to or squealing about?

I’m a shell of my former self. The cats are more neurotic than ever (and that’s saying something if you know our finicky felines). We’ve managed to childproof the kitchen and one bathroom but we doubt these pathetic bits of plastic will stop Ladybug for long. She holds on to the cabinet doors and shakes them like she’s The Incredible Hulk. Yesterday, she was quiet for more than 20 seconds which means I’ve dropped the ball and she’s either hanging off the edge of something or drinking poison. I whipped around only to find her staring intently at my hands. I’d been pushing the plastic doo-hickey down so I could access the cabinet. And she knows how I did it. I could literally see her mind working it all out.

Currently, she’s taking a pre-church nap and I need to take a shower. I just wanted to check in with you, to let you know we are alive but just barely. I can’t believe we actually encouraged her to learn this new skill. What in the world were we thinking?

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We go to the library, a place I have worked with the same people for over five years. Immediately, Ladybug is swooped down upon and carted off in a flurry of “isn’t she cute?” and “look what a big girl you are.” If I’m quiet, they honest to goodness would not notice I’m there. I firmly believe they think Ladybug drove herself over to see them. If I speak, they look up, startled that someone else is in the room, so consumed are they by Princess Ladybug.

At her well baby check up? Same scenario only replace librarians with nurses and even a doctor or two. I’m paying the bill. I’m holding her still while they dig around in her ears and listen to her heart. But I’m really not there at all.

Tonight the entire family trooped out to the store for a little pre-weekend shopping. The goal was to be quick because Michael had music rehearsal. No dilly dallying! However, Ladybug held audience in at least eight aisles of the store and that really slowed us down. Invisible or not, we have to push the cart and gather items off the shelves. Michael was holding Ladybug in his arms and a person we barely know held an entire conversation with Ladybug without ever once looking at her father. Maybe she thinks Ladybug is a ventriloquist, the way she keeps throwing her voice to answer questions. Maybe she thinks Ladybug knows how to levitate. She certainly never glanced at Michael or in any way indicated that he was present.

When we pushed away a few minutes later, Michael made a comment about being invisible and I had to break it to my beloved that as far as I can tell our invisibility is directly connected to our precious daughter. If we keep her, we lose our identity as we knew it pre-Ladybug and that’s all there is to it. We’ve decided it’s a fair trade because we love her madly and all that and maybe this new state of being (or not being as the case may be) will get us out of mortgage payments or dental exams. One can hope.

Yet right now she’s sleeping and I miss her. I miss how soft her face is, so smooth and without a single blemish. I miss her hot, formula breath on my face when she gives me an open-mouth kiss. I miss her scrunchy smile as we’ve come to call it.

I think I’ll go look at her one more time.

Good night.

And I admit I judge people who do this. I watch them open their ginormous bags and dump goodness knows what into the black hole within. Later they can’t find their keys or their checkbook and I smugly think, “Well, if you would organize your purse, ladies, this would not be a problem.”

Fast forward to this last week. Ladybug and I did some heavy errand-running on our own. Now we’ve gone here and there before but never really place after place with no rest in between. I’m at the Post Office, baby balancing precariously on the counter while I make a valiant attempt at a legible signature on my credit card receipt. Both hands are full as I scurry out of the next customer’s way and what do I do? Drop my copy of the receipt and the stamps right into my purse with complete disregard as to where they land.

Wal-Mart Parking lot. Ladybug’s shoe flies off in some unexplainable attempt at acrobatics and I find it on the ground, pick it up and throw it in my purse so we can keep on moving. Did you read that sentence and really let it soak in? Kate picked up something FROM THE GROUND (and a parking lot, no less, not clean, natural grass) and then placed it purposely in her bag.

This madness continues all over town.

Admittedly, I can’t stand it for long. I come home and immediately clean out my purse because that’s just who I am, but on the go, I’m a handbag maniac. I justify this entire exercise in chaos because it’s either this or lose my mind deciding which pocket a baby shoe, lip gloss and a pacifier can reside in happily.

So I was washing out bottles and little baby spoons and in general more pastel plasticware than any household should contain, when I heard a soft plop. Then another. Plop.

I glanced over at my cherub, strapped into her high chair just feet away. She smiled her cherub smile and waved her hands around, a sure sign of her happiness in life. Ah, bliss. Here I was, content in my motherhood, loved by the perfect baby, partnered with the perfect husband and all that rot. Then plop.

This time I caught her. My little princess was gleefully tossing her lovely green peas over the side of her high chair tray. She picked them up carefully with her dainty fingers and then sent them soaring to their deaths not unlike crazy people in barrels going over the side of Niagara Falls. She leaned over the side of her chair in order to watch their fall from a better angle. And then she laughed wildly.

It was the laughing that got to me, I think. I said, “No, Ladybug. Don’t waste your peas. Eat them, Baby Girl.” That caught her attention. She stared at me intently, ashamed of her waste and the mess it made. She ate two peas with an expression of true repentance on her little face. There. Point made. I went back to scrubbing.

Plop.

In other news, Ladybug slept last night. I mean, really slept. We put her down around 8:45ish and she was up at 9:30 and we put her down (finally!) at 10:30pm and did not hear a single peep from her until 8 this morning. I rolled over, all cozy in my consecutive hours of sleep and nearly had a heart attack when I saw the clock. Something must be HORRIBLY wrong! My baby doesn’t sleep like this! I raced into her room and sure enough she had just woke up. She rolled over and looked up at me as if to say, “Well, what do you know? This crib isn’t a medieval torture device after all. It’s actually quite nice in here and if you’re lucky, I’ll take my nap today, too.” And, she did, by the way. She slept nearly two hours and I got all sorts of stuff done and then took my own snooze.