I'm sorry. I can't hear you through all the quiet around here.

Oh, the noise. The noise!

Right now, the silence in my house is deafening. I'm sitting here in my makeshift study, and the baby's asleep in the stroller in the family room. I just sent William out with his Dee Dee to see a movie. The cicadas were tuning up outside a little while ago, and the air-conditioning was humming, along with the dryer. But everything is quiet and still now, save for my fingers, snapping along on the keyboard.

Hear that?

That's the sound of nothing! Nothing at all! Isn't it glorious?

I'm especially grateful for the quiet right now because it means the baby is getting a morning nap. I've heard for years about how it's so much harder to guarantee naps for your second child because you're always having to yank them up for a nap and throw them into the car so you can go pick up your older child. But as it turns out, being housebound doesn't really guarantee a nap for your second child either. Not when the older, noisy first child is home, too.

Because what happens is like this:

I feed Andrew from the comfort of my armchair in the family room. I notice that he's nodding off, so I lurch sideways and deposit him as carefully as possible into the stroller. I recline the back of the stroller so he's more or less lying down and pop his binky into his mouth. His little eyes close.

An instant later, William, who is upstairs in the playroom, receives some type of sonar-like message that hey, his little brother is asleep! He immediately abandons his quarry of Legos and races downstairs to the family room. He gathers speed and noise as he runs, like a steam engine. By the time he reaches me, he is whooping at a decibel level illegal outside of most rock concerts.

I bare my teeth quietly at him and hiss, "Ssssssh! Your brother is sleeping!" And William, to his credit, does stop hollering. For about three seconds, that is. Then he begins growling and yelping as loudly as he can, almost like he can't hold back the noise that has gathered inside him. He does this in irregular intervals, while I hiss and chastise him through gritted teeth, in the interims.

The baby, of course, can't sleep through this. His eyes fly open. He wriggles sideways and begins mewling. He's tired. He desperately needs a nap. But he cannot resist the powerful urge to see what his beloved older brother is doing. He cannot bear to miss out! He begins to fret. And so we miss the window for that nap.

Not today, folks! Well, maybe later today. But not for now.

Ah, silence.

______________

The Very Serious Andrew:



Seriously. I wonder how much longer he'll actually fit in the Bumbo seat. Look at those chunky little legs!