Please Go to Daddy...

I heard the familiar shuffle of little feet across the carpeted hallway approaching our bedroom at 3:40-something AM today.  It’s become routine – hear kid in hallway, figure out which kid it is, look at clock, calculate amount of time left in slumber, sigh.  I knew my alarm was set for 6:03am (yes, I set my clock on an odd, non-multiple-of-five time), so I found some solace in the fact that I did have a couple more hours to get some much-needed sleep before having to wake up for the day.  I’ve been battling a cold and a nasty headache for a few days now, and every minute of relaxation and sleep seems to help; every minute of loud or stressful dealings with kids seems to worsen things exponentially.

Please go to Daddy, I thought hard.  Please go to Daddy… Please go to Daddy… Please go Daddy. I repeat this in my head every time we have a middle-of-the-night visitor, and I never get the results I wish for.  My kids always come looking for me to address whatever it is they need or think they need in the middle of the night.

“I’m wet.”

“I’m scared.”

“I’m cold.”

“I want to sleep with you.”

“Can you turn my fan on?”

“Can you turn my closet light on?”

“Is it midnight?”

“Zoe’s in my bed!”

I know Dan hears them, too.  Every once in awhile (and by “every once in awhile,” I don’t mean to suggest that this happens with any frequency acceptable by me), he’ll address the need (and by “address the need,” I don’t mean to suggest that he presents solution which is acceptable by the kid with a need) by pre-emptively hopping out of bed the moment he hears a footstep on our bedroom floor and taking the middle-of-the-night visitor back to his or her room where he sternly insists he or she stay in bed and sleep until morning.  For the most part, though, he stays out of it, leaving me to deal with the situation as requested by my visitor.  Not that I blame him for staying out of this – no one in his right mind would deliberately interrupt his sleep to deal with a tired, whiny, unreasonable kid.  Some of us just don't have that choice.

As expected, last night’s middle-of-the-night visitor came to my side of the bed.  Normally, I acknowledge the visitor’s arrival by either getting out of bed to address the situation and get the child back into his or her bed or by just pulling the child up into our bed for him or her to finish his or her night’s sleep there.  I prefer the latter – it’s easier, and I like to cuddle with my kids.  While this is true, I do recognize it’s setting a bad precedent, one that’s difficult to break once it becomes routine.  Plus, Dan very strongly prefers that our kids sleep in their own beds.

Last night, I chose an entirely different approach.  It was Ella.  I knew I didn’t want to pull her up into our bed like she wanted; but I also didn’t want to deal with the struggle that would surely follow my informing her she needed to go back to sleep in her bed.  So I just ignored her and just felt her presence not more than 2 feet from my face.  Five minutes must’ve passed before either of us (Ella or me as Dan was certainly not going to jump in) said anything.  I can be pretty strong willed, but apparently Ella is stronger willed as I was the first to say something about her being there.

“What’s wrong, Baby Girl?” I asked, gently stroking the side of her head, hoping a calm acknowledgement of her being there might have some positive influence on the situation but knowing full well it wouldn’t.

“I want to sleep with you,” she replied, handing me her blanket and sheep as if this proposal of hers was actually going to happen.

I informed her that she couldn’t, which triggered the exact reaction I was looking to avoid by ignoring her when she first came into our room.  She was very upset, throwing pretty tempting phrases like, “I want to sleep with MY Mommy” at me to change my mind.  She also tried supposed statements of fact like, “My bed is cold” and then simple negativity like, “No!”  With every phrase she threw at me, I had a logical, pleasantly-delivered response.  This was a delay tactic as still held out hope that Dan would jump out of bed to take Ella back to her room and get her back into her bed himself.  It also provided me some time to muster the strength to pull myself out of bed to do that deed myself.  I mean, I was tired, sick and prone to getting another headache.  Meanwhile, Dan did chime in with some input like, “Big girls sleep in their beds, Ella,” and then he fell back to sleep.  Gee, thanks for the help.

Finally out of bed, I placed the blanket over my shoulder, picked Ella up and held her over the blanket so she could rest her head on it and then grabbed her sheep.  I love holding Ella in this position.  I then carried them (her, her blanket and that sheep) back to her room where she informed me once again that her bed was cold.

“That’s because your blankets are on the floor, Boo Boo,” I told her.  They were.

“I want to rock,” she informed me.  The glider where I oftentimes nursed her the first year of her life is still in her room, and she likes to rock in it with Dan or me holding her.

“No, we can’t right now” I told her, “but I’ll sit on the floor and hold you for a bit.”  I then proceeded to do so, rocking us back and forth a bit myself.  At the same time, I made a mental note of the time – 3:57am… I’d sit with her another couple of minutes, get her back into bed and then get back into my own by 4:03am.

The room was silent for a minute or two.  After that, it was time for me to transition her to bed.  She initially fought this move, using the same excuses as she did before.  Getting her to actually stay in her bed and fall back asleep seemed a very distant possibility.  Giving up and carrying her back to my bed was more likely.  Plopping into her bed, throwing a blanket on her, blowing her a kiss and darting back to my room only to have her follow me seemed a sure thing at this point.

But, call me the Ella whisperer (last night only), I did get her back into bed without much more of a squawk.  I placed her blanket on her and made sure she had a “handle” (corner of it) in each hand.  I then placed the multi-colored big knit blanket from our neighbors on top of that and then placed her quilt made by Aunt Sandi on top of that.  She could not claim she was cold.

She then told me she wanted to give me a hug and a kiss (this has become a signature Ella thing), to which I was, of course, receptive.  She told me to turn on the fan and the closet light (another part of the bedtime routine), to which I responded with a whispered, “of course” and actually did so.

I was practically holding my breath at this point.  Not that it was good that I was awakened at 3:40-something AM to deal with my middle-of-the-night visitor, but it was ending much better than I had expected.  I was actually walking out of Ella’s room, both of us with grins on our faces, Ella appearing to be cooperative and committed to staying in her bed and me with a good shot of getting almost two more hours of sleep next to my now snoring, fortunate husband.