Meaningful Glances

You should know that, as I type this first sentence, it's 1:00 pm. I finished my breakfast not long ago, and I only woke up as early as I did because a friend called during their lunch break. Let me explain.

Some of you might also read my wife's blog, and if you have seen her entry from last night, you will know that I dismantled Evelyn's crib yesterday. Correction: I finished dismantling Evelyn's crib yesterday. She started it the night before by snapping one of the metal brackets that holds the base to the frame as she tried to jump her way to sleep yet again. When Brigetta got home from work last night, I had the time to look a little closer at the damage and decide that it wasn't worth fixing. We already had the spin in place - Evelyn got to go to the park while daddy tried to fix her bed, but she knew that if he couldn't, he would make it in to a "big girl bed." Translation: I took apart the crib and put her mattress on the floor. I did everything I could to make it a cozy spot - that includes, in case you were worried, vacuuming thoroughly - and she was thrilled when she came home to see her "new" bed surrounded by some of her favorite stuffed animals with Granny's quilt and her puppy pillow on top. Come bed time, as Brigetta wrote in her blog, she ran right to her bed to crawl in and here's where the adventure begins. At about half past eight, after we'd sung our good night song and said a prayer, Evelyn broke from tradition (and why not, given her recent proclivity to break things?) and asked if Daddy would help her go to sleep. If you've kept up on how sleep works around here, you'd immediately grasp the significance here. If you haven't kept up, I'll spell it out: she NEVER asks this if she knows Brigetta is around, let alone in the same room. So, in almost stunned disbelief, Brigetta gave Evelyn a kiss and said good night, and Evelyn settled in to asking me "what animals do." We chatted briefly about the different things that animals do - whether or not little girls and boys do these things, too, etc. - until I mentioned, quite deliberately, that animals go to sleep. To my surprise, she actually stopped talking about it right away and was mostly quiet the rest of the way.

I should have known it was too good to be true.

TWO HOURS later, after attempting (unsuccessfully) to leave several times, mostly after I was sure she was asleep, she finally settled in to a regular snore. I was caught a little off-guard by the clinginess that preceded it, though. I told myself (still am telling myself, really) that it was a different bed at a different level, there was no sense of being enclosed, and so on - but she blame near panicked every time she thought I was leaving. So I stayed. And stayed, and stayed, and stayed. Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I got in a 20-minute power nap - you now, one of those short, refreshing naps that leave you ready to go for the rest of the day? Yeah, one of those, only with no rest-of-the-day left. Don't get me wrong - I was happy (and a little flattered, sure) to be asked to stay with her while she went to sleep, but it was simultaneously and incredibly frustrating to lay awake for the better part of two hours while she tossed, turned, and made sure my face was still right next to her bed. So at a little past 10:30pm, I marshalled all of my stealth skills and left her room as quietly as possible, fearful that any misstep would cause another panic.

Now I'm a night-owl as it is, but with the extra two hours of laying around and a power nap under my belt, I really didn't have a chance of getting to sleep. I chatted and watched TV with Brigetta for a little bit before she ran off to bed and then I was left to my own devices. Nothing too out of the ordinary about that - I'm up later than she is most nights, either reading, watching TV, or playing games online with a few fellow night-owl friends. The latter is what I did last night, meeting up with 4 or 5 friends to run around a virtual WWII, shoot guns, and throw grenades. Ya know - guy stuff. Until 3 in the morning! That's late, even for me...and I still wasn't tired! I had to draw the line somewhere, though, so I bowed out of the carnage and made myself go crawl in to bed. Not five minutes after doing that, the following phrase - again a first-ever - came floating over from the monitor in Evelyn's room: "I want my daddy." Somewhere between "You've got to be kidding me," and "Well, I'm already awake," I found myself padding over to her room, sweatshirt in hand, to curl up next to my little girl and feel her little hand reach out to make sure it was my face there before thinking "This isn't so bad," and immediately falling asleep.

I remember having to move her back on to her bed once after she'd managed to get her head on to the middle of my pillow, and then Brigetta was gently shaking me awake at 7:30-ish (?), at which point I stumbled back to my own bed, bouncing off door jams along the way, to slumber for a few hours more. So when the call from a friend came at ten minutes to noon, I snapped awake with that "I'm late for work" surge of adrenaline, which isn't entirely inappropriate since this is my day to get the bulk of my work from home done. And here I am blogging about it instead of doing it...

It was a story worth telling, though (I think), but not one I'm terrifically eager to repeat. I'll tell you how the "big girl bed" experiment continues when there's more to tell.