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“Good night, my beautiful butterfly,” Rose says, kissing Julie’s forehead as she tucks her butterfly blanket around her.
Then, she moves to the other bed in the room to do the same with Carrie and her Cinderella blanket. “Good night, my sweet princess.”
Carrie, upon being tucked in, immediately wriggles and kicks until her feet pop out the end, and then she says, “Mami, ant song please.”
“Ant song!” Julie agrees, kicking her legs under the covers. “Ant song! Ant song!”
Rose puts her hands on her hips, holding back a laugh in order to feign surprise. “What? You want to hear the ant song before bed? Are you absolutely sure?”
Carrie giggles and joins in on Julie’s chant: “Ant song! Ant song! Ant song!”
“Well, okay,” Rose sighs, dramatically falling back into the rocking chair between the girls’ beds. “I suppose I can sing my babies’ very favorite ant song just this once.”
The girls erupt into laughter again, and the sound makes Rose’s heart glow with the warmth of a million sunny days. She leans back in the chair and closes her eyes, hoping that by modeling tranquility, she can encourage Julie and Carrie to settle down, too, and rocks slowly back and forth as she begins to sing:
“The ants go marching one by one. Hurrah! Hurrah! The ants go marching one by one. Hurrah! Hurrah! The ants go marching one by one, the little one stops to suck his thumb, and they all go marching down. To the ground. To get out. Of. The rain.”
It’s not exactly an efficient lullaby—not when Julie and Carrie have an ongoing competition over who can sing along the lyrics fastest and loudest—but Rose has spent the last two and a half years choosing lack of sleep over making her children anything less than happy, and she’s not about to stop now.
Still, she has to at least try to say, “Settle down, nenas,” after each verse, and eventually, the giggling and play-fighting die down, if only because Carrie and Julie don’t know the words as well the higher the numbers go.
Until they get around to the fourth verse. Sometimes, Rose has the forethought to skip it entirely, since the girls are still too young to notice when the order of numbers is wrong. But tonight, she’s tired, and her daughters are settling into calm more quickly than usual, so Rose doesn’t realize which verse she’s gotten to until the words, “the little one stops to shut the door,” are already out of her mouth.
“Stop, Mami!” Julie shouts, making Rose jump and almost tumble out of the rocking chair entirely.
“Julie!” she gasps, a hand to her heaving heart. “Don’t shout like that, baby, you scared me!”
Julie huffs, arms crossed over her chest. “But that’s the end of the song, Mami.”
“Noooo,” Carrie whines immediately. “There’s one more! One two five!”
Rose starts to correct her, and then realizes now is not the time. “You don’t want to hear about the ants marching five by five, Julie-bean?”
Julie stubbornly shakes her head. “No, a-cause the little one already shutted the door, the house is closed now.”
Rose sighs. “Right. That makes sense, Julie. We can end the song after four ants.”
But of course they can’t, because Carrie shouts, “No! Five! Five! Five! Five! Five!”
“Okay, okay!” Rose says hastily, before a full-on tantrum can begin. “What if I switch them, huh? The ants go marching four by four, the little one stops to take a dive, then the ants go marching five by five and the little one stops to shut the door, and the house is closed, the end? How’s that, baby girls?”
Julie and Carrie exchange a look from across the room, their little faces screwed up in intense consideration. Rose does not have the energy for this right now—she’s about three seconds from tapping Ray or Trevor in.
But then, Julie says, “I guess that’s fine,” and snuggles back down under her covers.
“Four and dive are not rhyming words,” Carrie informs them, “but the ants can switch just this one time.”
Rose lets out a long sigh of relief. “Okay. Time for bed, girls. We’ll sing the ant song the right way tomorrow.”