“Goombas don’t have arms,” my three year old’s small voice declared from beside me.
Sitting on the floor next to his bed, I replied, “Hon, please go to sleep.” As fascinating as the anatomy of Mario brothers’ video game characters are, it was not a conversation I wanted to have that moment. I just wanted him to go to sleep.
And yet, I have some variation on that conversation every night. Sometimes it isn’t Goombas – sometimes it’s him asking for high fives or pretending he’s roasting marshmallows while camping. Once in a while, I play along, especially if it’s early in the night. Occasionally I’ll even make the fatal error of doing something entertaining – why oh why did I introduce him to shadow puppets? But most of the time, no matter what he says, my answer is the same: “Goodnight. Go to sleep.”
Why do I go through this nightly routine? Why not just walk out of the room and leave him to sleep on his own? It’s a combination of my kids’ strong-willed personalities and my own soft-heartedness.
Like most kids, my kids don’t like going to bed. But mine have an impressively single-minded commitment to staying awake. The sleep training recommendations say that when you move your kid from a crib into a toddler bed, they’ll get bored and stay in their room after the 20th or 30th time you walk them back to bed. Ha ha, not my kids! My older son ran out of his room more than 100 times the first night. He showed up in our room after we went to bed and stated, “It’s dark.” (I turned this painfully hilarious experience into an essay in the new book the Unofficial Guide to Surviving Life with Toddlers). Locking his door wasn’t the answer either. It only resulted in hysterical crying on both sides. Never doing that again.
Eventually, I started sitting with him in his room. I’d perch on the end of his toddler bed, my legs smooshed up against the support railing. I did that for almost a year, until he developed the self-control to stay in bed until he fell asleep by himself. These days he comes out once or twice, if at all.
Due to the non-success of the walking back to the bed tactic, we didn’t bother trying it when we moved my younger son into his toddler bed. So these days, I spend a chunk of my evening sitting with him as he winds down and prattles away about this and that.
While the inconvenience is annoying, the worst part is that it’s the opposite of quality time. To get him to disengage, I have to make our interactions as unsatisfying as possible. For the most part, I ignore him or make only the briefest of comments. Most of the time I half-pretend I’m asleep; the other half, I actually am. When I read about the parents who snuggle with their children and have beautiful bonding time, I’m a little jealous. I’m literally boring my kids to sleep.
Nonetheless, I still think the time spent waiting with them to fall asleep has been and is worthwhile. Besides getting them rest, I’m showing them that I will stand (or sit) beside them for as long as it takes for them to develop skills they need in life. That I’ll be there for the boring, dull parts that there’s no getting around. That I’ll love them in ways that are perfectly ordinary with no glamour at all.
Not everything in life is going to have beauty in it. Some things are just kind of boring. And that’s okay. As long as we show our love for each other through those dull times, we’ll be together for the glorious ones too.
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