The World of Five, Peekaboo, and the Paci Fairy

Photo by Diana Polekhina on Unsplash

Loren brought home a “My Mommy” fill in the blank sheet from daycare for Mother’s Day. It’s the first of its kind I’ve ever received, and my heart utterly melted when I saw it. On the part that says, “My Mommy is _____ years old,” Loren answered 3.

Three, because that number is big to him. At the age of two, the number three feels exciting and far-off and incomprehensible.

When we talk about three, we talk about the future. “You’re not three yet, but you will be...” This is likely unfathomable to him too, because he operates in the world of “now,” or “after my nap,” or “after my snack.” Whenever we tell him something like, “Grandma and Grandpa are coming on Saturday,” his eyes glaze over. “Now?” he asks in return. We sing the Days of the Week song and count down the days until Saturday to help him understand.

Mostly, Loren lives in the world of five.

Five is the number that he uses when he wants a lot of something, like syrup, slices of cheese, or episodes of Bluey. “I want this many,” he says, holding up five fingers and nodding his head enthusiastically. “Five. Sooo many. I want five syrups.”

What else? Kai started playing peekaboo the other morning in his highchair, after he’d finished eating a bowl of oatmeal with his hands and fingering the remains on his tray. He continued until his hair looked as slicked back as John Travolta’s 1978 box office success, Grease. A cross between that and the image of what happens to hair when you think of a cartoon being electrocuted. He continues to play this game, day after day, after he’s doused his hands (and the floor) in his morning oatmeal. So, there’s been a lot of hosing his clothes off in the kitchen sink and washing his hair after breakfast this week.

Back to my oldest. Loren took a tumble on Wednesday morning before daycare and had a bloody lip that swelled up as big as a grape. He couldn’t eat, drink from a sippy cup or straw, or close his mouth properly for two days. There was an endless stream of drool cascading down his front lip. We spent a lot of time changing drool-soaked t-shirts. One other result of his tumble was that he couldn’t use his paci.

The first night he fussed about not being able to put his paci in his mouth and he fell asleep holding it in his hand. The second day, he slept with his paci in his bed, nearby but not touching it. On the third day, when he still couldn’t use it properly, Mommy and Daddy thought it was the perfect moment for the Paci Fairy to visit.

We’ve been talking about the Paci Fairy for a few months, so when I asked Loren if he was ready to give his pacis away, he enthusiastically responded, “Yes, I am!”

Loren put his pacis in a basket on the front porch and announced, “Paci Fairy, these are for you!” When he woke up the next morning, the Paci Fairy had taken the pacis and left a stuffed dinosaur, some m&m’s, and a dinosaur puzzle in the basket in their place. Loren was ecstatic.

He occasionally still asks about his paci in the middle of the night, but for the most part it is behind him.

Before the Paci Fairy took Loren’s pacis away in exchange for his gifts, she held them in her hands. She stared at them and wanted to cry. She contemplated saving them and quickly decided against it. She had a hard time letting them go, much harder than Loren did, because it wasn’t just the pacis, it was the two years of life before this that were now—just like that—seemingly behind us. The Paci Fairy’s babies were growing up too fast, and she was grateful and sad.

They only live in the world of five, play peekaboo while rubbing oatmeal in their hair, and use pacis for a short period time. And while it may seem like an eternity as it’s happening, I try to zoom out and picture this moment in the grand scheme of their life—in the grand scheme of my own life—and then I see more clearly that these moments are mere fractions, and it helps me savor them a little bit more.