Two Things That Happened Recently In Bed

1. Jackson woke me up at about 1:00 a.m. the other morning and said, "Can you help me?" He was sleeping in only a t-shirt, and he'd kicked off the covers and his lower portions felt like a delicious bundle of Otter Pops. So, intuiting his meaning as only a mother can, I pulled the blankets back up over him. He was lying on his stomach, and the next thing he said was, "Pet it." "It," as I understood it at this particularly sleepy moment in both our lives, could only mean his butt. So I rubbed his butt under the covers for about ten seconds and soon he was sawing little toothpick-sized logs again. A minute later Jack rolled over and snuggled his double raspberry sno-cone* of an ass right into my warm tummy. The acorn doesn't fall too far from the oak.

*This is the blue flavor, you'll recall.

2. As parents of a young child, we tend to have sex at weird times, and because Jackson is now occupying our bed noon and night, we tend to fornicate for non-procreative purposes in unusual locations as well. During the week, on days when Jackson's at school, sometimes we can both sneak home for a nooner in the big bed, but on the weekends we're waiting for Jackson's naptime so we can get our freak(s) on in his room (or I guess we should call it The Room Into Which We Throw His Toys), on top of the Spiderman fleece throw that I bought on sale at Christmastime. The thing about this arrangement is that I can occasionally feel a dutiful obligation to take advantage of the limited free sex time, whether I'm in the mood or not. Sometimes the force is with me; other times I have to kill a few Ewoks to find it. So a few weeks ago Jackson's conked out on the bed and Jack and I are all set up on the floor in the Toy Room with the blanket, and I'm kind of nuzzling back and forth on Jack's cheeks in this half-autistic, self-stimming way, just blankly fuzzing our cheeks together on one side, then the other, then going back to the first one. I wasn't particularly connecting with him, but I guess I was making some "mm-mm" lovey noises to kind of, I don't know, make it at least sound like this was a really sexy thing for me to do. After about, who knows, forty-five seconds of this yam-fisted* activity (Jack tends to lose patience with sex acts that threaten to go nowhere, as I suppose everyone but me does), he pulls his head back and says, "Am I in a Lifetime movie right now?"

*Ham-fisted seems a little strong here, but the sweet blandness of an orange root vegetable with eyes --and, I guess, fists -- has just the right frisson of je ne sais quoi.