Sometime after 2am
Most nights, Evanny creeps unobtrusively out of her room and into ours, taking the long way to my door, like they all do, every time, and crawls into bed beside me: I lift the covers, she curls between my body and the edge, I put the warmed blankets back down over her long, little shape, I curl an arm around her, and we go back to sleep.
It's an imperfect sleep, for me at least; her father is breathing in my ear and pinning my hip down on the other side, and she sleeps actively, just like she lives when awake. I close my eyes in an easy spoon; I open them to find she's rolled over, flinging an arm across my face, and there's a finger in my nose.
At 4:45am, her sister scuffles into the room, dragging her footie-feet across the hardwoods, creaking out the same chant in her sleep-rusted voice every time: "nuuuuuurse. Nursey-nuuurse. I want to nuuuurse. I want boooooobie." If we argue about the time, which I usually do when it's not yet even 5, she'll stand there, eyes squeezed shut against the darkness, and start to yell. "It IS morning! IT IS!" This time, since I'm not asleep anyway, and haven't been already for a while, I don't bother. "Just wait," I whisper. "Let me extract myself from under your sister and I'll come with you to the office." "The office" is the spare mattress that allows the too-often-necessary musical-beds routine that is life-with-under-5s, lying half-made on the floor of the room where the desk it's completely in the way of is wedged. Someday this will be an office, but for now, that's just a word. The extraction isn't easy: Evvy's lead legs seem stuck to mine, and she wakes enough to reach for me in protest when I go. "Go back to sleep," I tell her. "You're warm and snug, here's my tiger, and you have a nice warm daddy to snuggle." She frowns as she flops her head harder than necessary down into my pillow, but she stays, and we go, Tabitha leading the way with that same, insistent shuffle.
In the office, she confidently strides across the mattress, pulls back the cover less down duvet, crawls beneath it, and scooches down far enough to be able to reach what she's after when I lie beside her. Our usual hour-long tussle ensues: "shhh. That's a girl. Close your eyes and go back to sleep. Stop fidgeting, Tab, its sleeping-time. Please stop poking my nipples!" As her breathing starts to deepen, best it can around the snotty snuffling we're all wrestling with, an echoing shoof-shoof of footies slides into the doorway. "Evanny," I whisper, as gently as possible, "what the fuck are you doing here? Your is sister is almost asleep. You had a warm daddy to cuddle. I am trying very hard to put this baby to bed. Please go back. To your bed or mine, I don't care, but please go." She stands there for a few minutes, not saying anything, and then comes in anyway, walking deftly over our feet, pulls up the covers on her sister's far side, crawls in, and lies still. "I want you," she says, and that's that. I find that my arms are long enough to reach over the nurseling to stroke her hair a few times and then rest a hand on her back, and after a long few minutes, they're both asleep again.
By this point, of course, I have to pee. And my cough keeps threatening to wake them. And anyway, Evanny getting herself comfortable required pulling the duvet so far to her side that I'm under nothing but a crumpled woven-fleece throw that's so old it's probably half made of cat hair, and it's cold, so I engage in the painstaking process of attempting to ninja out of the bed without pulling on the bookshelf to elicit a shift, without stepping on a wrong board on the floor to produce a loud creak (they're all wrong boards). Eventually I make it, only to find myself caught in a lingering and photographic gaze. The cluttered junk room disappears; all I can see is the dark fan of Evanny's hair across the grey impression of a pillow, Tabitha's open mouth, snoring like the very most earnest of rosebuds, one arm trailing away toward my empty spot, her head half-tucked beneath her sister's elbow. I tear myself away and down the hall: water in, water out, down the hall some more, and back into my own bed, where I lie propped up on pillow to negate the cough, thoroughly tucked in to avoid the chill, waiting for the chirping-birds sound of Matt's alarm clock, and missing them, those two little sisters, tumbled together like a pair of long-haired spaniels, puppy-breath and soft bellies, the most magical thing I've ever seen.