MADELEINE: Mama! I'm feeding Baby Lily her baby milk! But...do we have any cups in the shape of bottles?
ME: We used to have pretend bottles, but I think we got rid of them all since you girls don't really play much with baby dolls anymore.
MADELEINE: I know! I'll use my WATER BOTTLE! (picking up a half-drunk Poland Spring bottle that is at least two weeks old and has been sitting on her bedroom floor all this time.)
A few minutes later, Madeleine was ready for her next motherhood activity.
MADELEINE: Okay, Mama. Now I'm gonna do BABY time. But how do I do baby time?
ME: Uh, I don't know.
MADELEINE: No, Mama. You know that thing you do with your baby for baby time?
ME: Umm...breastfeeding?
MADELEINE: No. Mama. You know how you do baby time?
ME: Do you mean tummy time?
MADELEINE: Oh. Yeah! Tummy time. So Mama. How do you do it?
ME: You lay the baby on her tummy on the floor so she can practice lifting her head and working her neck muscles.
MADELEINE: (placing Baby Lily facedown on a bundle of blankets on the bed)
ME: You have to do it on the floor. You don't ever put a baby's face on soft things, because if she can't lift her head enough, she won't be able to breathe.
MADELEINE: (looking at me like I'm an idiot) But does it even MATTER if it's just a DOLL?
ME: Well, no. I'm just telling you so you'll know what you would do with a real baby.
Seriously, what's my problem? Who cares if Madeleine knows how to do it with a real baby. It's not like she might have baby nieces and nephews that she helps take care of when she's older, or anything. Whatever. It's a doll, so go ahead and shove her face down in a pile of blankets. It's not like she can actually lift her head up anyway.
Next up was Snuggle Time.
MADELEINE: Okay, Mama, now it's Snuggle Time with Baby Lily.
ME: Oh, okay.
MADELEINE: So, for Snuggle time, you wrap a blanket around your baby, and...and...
ME: Snuggle her?
MADELEINE: No. Mama. That's not what you do in Snuggle Time. You wrap her in a blanket, and then sit on the couch and wait until she WARMS UP.
ME: Oh, I see.
MADELEINE: (taking Baby Lily to the couch) One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nineteneleventwelvethirteenfourteenfifteen. MAMA? It takes FIFTEEN seconds to warm up, but if you do it longer than that, well Mama? Her face was starting to get really red and hot, so I had to count really quickly.
I guess she needed to warm up because she was blue from her near suffocation during Tummy Time.
The next activity was not anything I have ever tried with my own children.
MADELEINE: Okay, the SECOND to last thing is tricky. You have to put the baby on the table with her HEAD hanging off. Liking, hanging really far down. To exercise her head. And then the grown-up has to LOOK at her.
That looks really safe. Madeleine is gonna be a great baby-sitter. Anyone wanna hire her in a few years? She's guaranteed to practice some great baby acrobatics with your kid!
And the final baby activity:
MADELEINE: Now the last thing is kind of hard. You have to THROW the baby up in the air TWICE. And catch her. (tossing Baby Lily) Woah! She did a FLIP. I made her do a flip because of the way I tossed her. It was an ACCIDENT.
That was the end of the world's most terrifying Baby Activity Time. Madeleine put Baby Lily to bed and proceeded to put on a fashion show for the family, complete with a soundtrack that is completely appropriate for haute couture.
MADELEINE: Mama? Can you put on some music? Like, some really CHURCHY music?
So she traipsed along her living-room-floor runway to the sountrack of Byzantine Chant, because...that's how she DO.
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