Tag: baby

Beloved son,

Every once in a while, you wake up in the middle of the night hungry. Maybe you’re going through a growth spurt, or you’re having a bad dream, or you ate bad the evening before. Who knows the real reason—Mom and I try not to overanalyze these things.

Whatever the cause, we’ve developed a routine in response:

1. Your crying wakes me up. Mom, strong sleeper she is, barely stirs.
2. I come to your room, where you’ve removed everything from your crib: pillow, blanket, binky, and stuffed pig companion lie strewn on the floor, and you’re standing in your crib, facing the door expectantly.
3. I give you a hug and ask what’s wrong. You sign for food, which, I only now realize as I write this, is a rare holdout in your language. Most of the words you once signed now emerge as spoken words, but in the middle of the night, anyway, it’s always your fingertips tapping your mouth, accompanied by an urgent hum of “hm, hm, hm.”
4. I pick you up and you drop all the weight of your head into my shoulder. I like step 4 very much.
5. To maximize your sleep time later on, I change your diaper. Sometimes you protest, but only for about half a second. You just don’t have the energy to mount a full-on resistance. Plus, I reassure you that we will get some food afterward, and by this point in your life, you are actually pretty good at understanding small delays in gratification.
6. Your diaper fresh and your body nestled back into my arms, we retrace our nighttime steps in the absolute dark of the kitchen. Parenthood has basically turned me into Batman when it comes to navigating unlit areas of the house. I glide through the dark, fetching a fruit pouch and some Goldfish from the pantry and a bowl and cup from the cupboards. Sometimes you remind me of our mission if I dawdle too long, for instance saying “bowl” or “eau” (water). After all, you know the routine: If you could write, you could document these steps just as well as I could. I fill the cup with water and the bowl with Goldfish, and we return to your room.
7. The whole process is strongly reminiscent of those late-night bottle feedings we would do when you were just months old, but this next part feels especially nostalgic. I put you on my lap and rock back and forth in the chair as you eat. What more basic bond is there between us than father feeding son. It’s always pouch, water, Goldfish, water. You suck down the pouch, then suck down some more with my help. You eat every single Goldfish, no matter how many I put in the bowl. (I’ve learned not to put very many.)
8. Once sated, you take your binky, give me one last cuddle, and lie back down in your bed. Sometimes when I’ve returned to Mom’s and my bedroom, I watch you in the monitor, lying on your back twirling your hair, your eyes like glassy black orbs in the camera’s night vision. You never fuss, though; you wind back down and drift off to finish out your night of sleep.

This routine is occasional enough and so precious a bonding time that I never feel frustrated or impatient about having to get up to care for you. I know that your days of such neediness will not last forever, so in the sleepy quiet of the night, I savor every second of it.

It’s not all sentiment, though—from time to time, there is humor, too. Last night when we did this routine, you were getting to your last Goldfish, and the beauty of the moment nearly overwhelmed me. I leaned down and kissed your soft little head, and in the quiet sanctuary of your room, silent save for the gentle lullabies of your music monkey, I whispered, “Je t’aime.” Without missing a beat between crackers, you retorted, “no.”

I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. Maybe you were scolding me for adding unsanctioned material to the routine. Maybe you were imagining some subtext behind “I love you,” as if I were really saying, “okay, time to go back to bed.” Maybe you were just rehearsing one of your favorite words.

I’d rather think, though, that it was a Han Solo moment, your way of hearing me perfectly well and responding, “I know, Dad. I know.”