A few weeks ago, Lucy got hold of the spout on the pot of the freshly-brewed coffee at church while Jim and I were getting ourselves decaf, and went from pottering about happily to grabbing my coat, screaming. Jim was the one who figured out what she’d done, and once he did we held her wrist under the stream of cold water in the drinking fountain for a few minutes. She stopped crying, and I gave the lower half of her fleece jacket sleeve a good soaking. By bedtime, amazingly, all that remained on her skin was a small pink zigzag mark. Before I put her down, I have been talking her through a summary of the day, to remind both of us where we are and where we have been. That evening, I asked her what she remembered about the day.
“Upup!” she said.
“That’s right. Upup watched you last night and put you to bed.” (My mom had watched her for Jim and me to go on a date to our favorite waffle restaurant.)
“Beh-beh!”
“Yeah, Daddy played a really fun game with you and the big Beh-beh.” (Lucy’s early Christmas present from my mom, with parental approval, is a huge teddy bear which, held up with its feet on the ground, is almost as tall as Jim. Lucy adores it with wholehearted abandon. In the mornings when she gets up, I say, “Do you want to go see Beh-beh?” and she gets a slow-growing, beatific grin and says in a low voice humming with gladness, “Beh-beh.” Jim had taken Beh-beh and hidden behind him and made him stalk into our bedroom, where Lucy was sitting on the bed. Being stalked by Beh-beh was the best thing that had happened to her all day.)
“—.” Lucy made a small noise that might have been “ouch” and seemed to be doing something with her hands (the lights were off).
“Yeah, you got that coffee spout open because Mommy and Daddy didn’t realize you could do it, and then you burned your arm, didn’t you. That hurt. Then we ran cold water on it and it felt a little better.” I finished the last song and picked her up to lay her in bed. “Du bist meine einzige Lucy, und ich hab dich ganz schrecklich lieb,” I said (“You are my only Lucy and I love you an awful lot.”)
“Dettich,” she said, repeating schrecklich (awful), which is usually the word she picks from that sentence. Then I told her I was looking forward to her waking up, and laid her in her crib. She was quiet, and then, as I stepped out of the room, she said, “Appy.”