Bedtime

My son is no different from most children in that he doesn’t like to go to bed. As recently as a few weeks ago, when he was still transitioning between being an infant and a toddler, he would scream and cry if we laid him in his crib before he fell asleep, to the point that we never put him there unless he was asleep. More often than not, he dozed off on the living room couch, or in our bed.

These past few weeks, however, have been much better. He still cries when I tell him it’s time to go nuh-night, and when I carry him up the stairs, and even when I first lay him down. What’s different now is that when I put him in the crib, he usually stops crying, rolls over onto his stomach, and allows himself to be covered with a blanket. It’s almost as if he’s saying, “Fine, you win, I’ll play by your rules. But you’re gonna cover me, jerk.”

Tonight was the same old routine, except when I went to carry him upstairs, he grabbed a blanket he likes and refused to let go. I brought him into his room, no tears, laid him in his crib, no tears, and covered him with the blanket, no tears. (Mama also wasn’t home, which means he really had nobody to cry for.) What really made me smile, though, was what happened next. As I was walking out of his room, I stopped at the end of his crib and said, “Joey, Daddy loves you.” Barely awake, he rolled his head up slightly to look at me, lazily lifted one arm, and slowly waved. Again, it was that nonverbal communication that happens when toddlers figure out that they can tell grownups what they want but lack the words to get their point across. In this case, he was saying, “Yeah, yeah, I know. Love ya too. See you in the morning. Close the door on your way out.”

Moments like those are the best part of being a dad.