Sleeping Like a Baby
February 22nd, 2006 Caroline
Anyone who’s ever actually had a baby knows that sleeping like one means waking randomly at all hours of the day and night and screaming your head off until someone puts a nipple in your mouth.
Sleeping like a preschooler, now, that’s some good sleeping.
Tony and I were cleaning up tonight when we heard a faint beeping. Smoke alarm? Low battery on the cell phone? What appliance was trying to communicate to us? I headed upstairs, following the sound into Ben’s room. Ah-hah! His clock.
Ben is four, he goes to preschool in the afternoons, he’s not setting the alarm. But we’re trying to teach him how to tell time. Mostly, we’re focussed on one time, 7 AM, the hour until which we want him to stay in bed every morning. Instead, he tends to come thundering down the hall between six and six thirty, climb into bed on my side (he knows Tony will march him back to bed) and cuddle next to me, demanding that I tickle his belly and asking “Is it morning yet? Is it morning yet?” every minute until I can’t bear it anymore and, despite the dark, roll out of bed with him and head downstairs.
So, there’s the alarm clock beeping away, but I can’t get to it without first tripping over a pile of Lincoln Logs. Crash! The clock is on his headboard, somewhere, but so are his jar of seaglass treasure, his sippy cup of water, a framed picture of Tony and me, the egg carton caterpillar that he made at school, and on and on. I fumble around ineffectually for a minute before giving up and turning on the light.
And there he is, flat on his back, arms flung over his head, snoring away, oblivious to the alarm and the light and my very presence, which would have had him wide awake, sniffing for milk, back when he was a little nursing thing.
Good sleeping, buddy.
Entry Filed under: General