The Longest Shortest Time

We Can’t Stop: Flashlight Edition

To all of you reading this: I hope you are safe and someplace with lights and heat and water and cold refrigerators. Luckily, we only lost some of those things for a few days, and managed to not have any of the GIANT TREES that fell all over our neighborhood fall on us.

We stuck it out at home for the first two nights before heading to a friend’s. For only one of those nights was Sasha awake after sundown but before bedtime. She got to watch Daddy chop onions by candlelight and cook pasta and meat sauce, trying to use up expensive ingredients from the freezer (smoothie with ALL of the frozen fruit for breakfast!). When she got bored with that, she came and found me lying in bed, sick with some body-achey-sore-throaty thing. She was frustrated with me because I didn’t feel like talking, and I could tell if I didn’t think of something fast she’s start hitting me.

That’s when I introduced her to the flashlight.

I had one sitting at the side of the bed and I gave it to her and showed her how to work the button. She was thrilled, and started making shadows on the wall with her hair and the cat’s ears. I told her she could use the flashlight to see things like books. And immediately, she ran and got the two closest ones: Grumpy Bird and Harold and the Purple Crayon, both old favorites.

One at a time, she propped the books in her lap and asked me if I’d like her to read them to me. I gave a hoarse but enthusiastic yes. And she told me the stories—with remarkable accuracy! It made me think back to when I started the We Can’t Stop Reading lists and how back then I was excited when she would simply fill in the blanks with a single word. And now here she was “reading” me entire books by flashlight during a crisis.

In other news, we are going through another poop-withholding phase that is really confounding me. I think it’s related to the disruption in routine surrounding the hurricane, and all of the insecurity a natural disaster like this raises (despite the illusion of being in control and reading Mommy books).

I’ll be posting a fresh list of books we can’t stop reading soon. But for now, I’m curious: anyone else have interesting flash-lit reading experiences? Any Sandy-related LST’s?

P.S. We were just at the library, where lots of people who still don’t have power are hanging out with their laptops. We were eating a snack in the cafe, when we heard a loud rattly noise coming from the corner. It was a fat old man hunched over his laptop, snoring up a storm. Sasha decided the best thing to do would be to sing him “You Are My Sunshine—the song I always sing her before bed. Thank goodness it didn’t wake him up!