Tag: nighttime

Purple Balloon Suspended at Bedtime

Beloved daughter,

Bedtime was different tonight. Normally, we read three or four books as the light on your sunset alarm clock dims, and then I pray, sing you a song, and lay you down.

Tonight, halfway through our first book, you scrambled off my lap in search of something—I assumed a different book, until you went behind the rocking chair and found a big purple balloon that had wandered in earlier in the day. Mom and I have had our share of sleep struggles with you, and so I’ve read my share of baby bedtime articles. I know that the less stimulation at bedtime, the better.

This time, though, I couldn’t help but let you go on. As your lullaby monkey carried on its sleepy tune, you did a little dance around your room, bear-hugging that balloon and tossing it up in the air, then watching it with glee as it drifted back down. Sometimes you’d look at me instead, smiling, and the balloon would fall behind you or plop onto your head.

I realized as I watched you, the light growing dimmer by the minute, that part of the moment’s magic was its relative silence. There was the soft padding of your footed pajamas atop the carpet and the twinkle of the lullabies, but unlike any such scene with your brother nowadays, there was no talking. It was just a girl and her balloon and her daddy looking on, delighting in her delight.

These wordless moments with you don’t feel as if they are without words; they feel beyond words.

Such moments are an increasingly rare commodity as your vocabulary blooms. You now know quite a few words—up, water, cheese, please (a common combo, those last two), and of course brother, mama, and dada, to name a few. Even when you’re not using words I recognize, you’re often talking, telling stories and describing the world around you in a tongue familiar to me yet indecipherable. And when it comes to listening, your comprehension is off the charts. You are definitely in that Baby Groot phase of communication, eager to show off how much you understand and unafraid to make mistakes.

For as much as I love your adorable voice and the funny-sounding words emerging from your mouth, I am already starting to miss my pre-language daughter. And though I want you to keep growing and learning every day—I couldn’t stop you if I tried—there is part of me that is glad you’ve been behind in learning to speak, part of me that grasps the blessing of slowness.

Bedtimes like tonight’s are a gift. It is a gift that Mom and I get a few more moments before the busyness of a young tongue kicks in, a gift that we can walk wordless with you just a little longer, that I get to witness the occasional blissful balloon bedtime, that I can deceive myself in the lowering light, lulled by the soft melodies of babyhood, that perhaps the purple balloon floating above your smiling face somehow won’t fall back down.

Nighttime Exchange

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.”