Our Favorite Things During a Pandemic
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One of the foundational pieces of media from my childhood is The Sound of Music. How important is the movie to my family?
Let’s just say it’s one of those things where when someone marries into the family, other people who have previously married in sometimes warn the newcomer that adequate reverence for The Sound of Music is both encouraged and mandatory.
Now, I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. We don’t take our fandom too far. It’s not like we’re all weirdly passionate about marionette puppetry, sewing play clothes from drapes, and breaking into impromptu duets of “Edelweiss.” Only some of us are.
We’re not crazy fans, it’s more like The Sound of Music has subtly infiltrated our lives to the exclusion of most other things. Instead of saying someone isn’t great with kids, we just compare them to the Baroness in the ball-playing scene on the patio. And if someone is fake or annoying, we just call them Louisa. You know, little things like that.
Considering all this, it might come as a surprise that I haven’t properly introduced The Sound of Music to my children. I’m not sure why. They know of it and some of the songs, but I don’t think we’ve watched the whole movie.
However, this parenting failure presented me with a unique and unexpected opportunity. It turns out what Fraulein Maria said is true, “When the Lord closes a door, somewhere He opens a window.”
Every night when I lay down beside my 6-year-old in his bed, immediately after our stuffed animal puppet show, he asks me what he should think about to help him fall asleep. As you might imagine, since I have to come up with something every night, I was starting to run out of things.
So, I did what I am inclined to do in case of a thunderstorm, dog bite, bee sting, or pandemic, I turned to “My Favorite Things.” Since he is not very familiar with the movie, I hatched a plan to start plucking items from the song to use as his bedtime thought. I wanted to see how long I could go before he suspected something was up.
The first night was pretty straightforward as far as these things go. I just took it from the top and went with “raindrops on roses.”
It is a bit of a weird one, but luckily, he didn’t question it. He went to sleep easily, and I was able to escape his room a few minutes later.
Later that night, however, sometime after midnight, he appeared by the side of my bed as he often does, rubbing his eyes and tugging on my shirt to rouse me from my deep sleep. I took him back to bed and resumed my position by his side.
As he was arranging his pillow, he said, “Daddy, I finished raindrops on roses. What should I do now?”
“Kittens,” I replied breezily. Or as breezily as is possible at two in the morning. “And their whiskers, of course.”
He rolled over and went back to sleep. A two-fer on the first night. Nice.
The next night we moved onto snowflakes, but you know, ones that kind of just stay there on your nose and eyelashes. He decided that this was an excellent one as long as they didn’t make him sneeze.
Then came a bright copper kettle.
“Like the ore?” he asked.
“I guess?” I replied.
“Like in Minecraft,” he concluded.
Things were going incredibly smoothly, but we hit a bit of bump in the road when I introduced “Wild geese, but get this, they’re flying so high it’s like the moon is sitting on their wings.”
“Can we do baby horses instead?” he asked.
“How about cream-colored ponies?” I countered.
“Okay.”
Crisis averted.
The next night was similarly rocky. Perhaps the butler was secretly spying on us and passing information to the enemy. It’s impossible to say, really.
“How about sleigh bells tonight?” I suggested.
“No, I can’t hear them,” he said.
“Doorbells?”
“Why?”
“No idea,” I said. “Let’s do brown paper packages, but here’s the thing, they’re tied up with string!”
“What is that?” he asked.
“Presents, basically.”
He closed his eyes intently, working hard to conjure an image of this highly unusual item in his mind.
On the most recent night, I went with “it’s winter and it’s just silvery-white with snow…but then, it melts away into a beautiful green spring.”
I felt like my imagery and inflection really sold it, but I was wrong.
“I like snow though,” he said.
“Okay, snow it is,” I replied.
This whole journey has taught me the value of being flexible. That’s an important lesson for parents everywhere. No matter how much you might want your children to love crisp apple strudel, sometimes you must accept the fact that what they really love is packaged fruit snacks that smell like a hospital waiting room.
As we adjust to this new normal in which we’re living, I think we’re all growing, developing, regressing, and just trying to get by. Sometimes all at the same time. I can honestly say that right now there’s only one thing keeping me going through the pandemic and everything else that’s going on in the world.
The knowledge that schnitzel with noodles night is just around the corner.
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