Mother Will

It’s been at least a few weeks since Will let me know that the baby ducklings that had been growing in his pregnant belly had finally made their way out. (That day he checked the scale to see how much weight he’d lost postpartum).
There’s been little talk of his ducklings since then, but today Will, still battling a bit of tummy trouble, decided to play nurturing mother – this time to Winnie the Pooh.
I walk into the living room, Owen in arms, and find Will on the couch, his shirt raised on the left side with Winnie the Pooh suckling comfortably on Will’s unsuckable chest. (He’s got Pooh well positioned, in a textbook “football hold.”)
“Mom, I am nursing Winnie the Pooh,” he says matter-of-factly.
I try to catch the moment on camera, but Will seems to take the view that nursing is not a public event, so he quickly changes mama tasks and starts walking Pooh around the room.
“I’ve got him up on my shoulder in case he needs to get a burp out,” Will says. “Mom, I’m patting him.”
Next Will, who has emptied an entire laundry basket of clean clothes onto our living room floor (yes, I let him do this), finds a waterproof pad and lays it on the carpet for some Winnie diaper changing. He goes to a closet and finds a poster tube, which will serve as the wipe dispenser.
“And I try not to get any poopy on me. Sometimes I do,” says Will, as I wonder if he’s trying to clue me in on the origins of his stomach bug.
He finishes the invisible diaper change and announces, “Mom, it’s stinky in here.”
“Is that because of Winnie the Pooh’s dirty diaper?” I ask.
“Yeah, and I need to get some spray.”
He’s thinking of the Lysol he watched me spray in the bathroom this morning. (I’m not normally a big Lysol user in our own home, but with diarrhea comes extra vigilance and general paranoia.)
So Will gets out a second poster tube and starts spraying our whole living room.
I’m wishing I could find my own tall tube of invisible non-toxic disinfectant and clear the house of all sick germs with a few presses of the finger. And I might add in a little magic ingredient to spray my mama-son back to wellness again.