Dreamtime: Night-time Convos with your Kids

Trying to get our nursery and early-primary age kids to sleep can take its toll on our sanity. We sit there in the dark with them for what feels like days as they pick at the wall, drum on the side of the bed, flick the buttons on plug sockets, and contort themselves into shapes Russian gymnasts would baulk at – doing anything and everything, really, except closing their eyes – all the while fighting the rising tide of irritation that’s pushing us ever closer to Hulking-the-fuck-out. Inexplicably, despite our best and most desperate efforts, we’re usually the ones who end up falling asleep. The indignity of it: drummed to sleep by our own over-tired kids.

It’s not only easier just to give up and go with it: it’s better. After all, we have some of the most marvellous conversations of all with our kids inside that limbo-land between hyperactivity and unconsciousness. Daft, sweet conversations full of warmth, whimsy, lunacy and laughter: Twin Peaks meets Mr Tumble with a dash of Austin Powers – with banter that sings, zings and pops like dialogue from an Aaron Sorkin show written exclusively for kids.

On those nights you’d gladly sit in the half-dark chatting nonsense with them forever.

My kids sleep in single beds on opposite sides of their bedroom. The space between the two beds is small, but large enough to house a black leather reclining chair, upon which my wife or I will sit, depending upon whose turn it is to do the stories. Our youngest, Christopher, who’s now three, always falls asleep first. He insists on cuddling your arm, which he pulls into his bed and yanks close to his chest like a favourite teddy bear. Jack, freshly five, is a different story. He’s almost always still awake by the end of the last story, and will do everything in his power to repel sleep. The other night, after about the five millionth shush, I decided to indulge him.

‘Daddy,’ he said. ‘Did I tell you I saw Santa at school today?’

Regular readers of this blog will be well aware of my opposition to the Santa myth. They’ll also know that I was over-ruled and out-gunned on the matter, hence why Jack fully believes in Santa, knows I don’t, and feels deeply sorry for me as a consequence. Never-the-less, I decided to indulge in a dance of devilment around the periphery of his belief.

‘How many Santas have you seen this year in total, do you reckon?’ I asked him.

He pursed his lips. ‘Two.’

‘I think it’s three.’

He nodded, as if to say, ‘Yeah, what’s your fucking point?’

I pressed on, adopting the air of a smug prosecutor about to snare him in a Columbo-esque trap: ‘Was it the same Santa each time, do you think – the same guy just moving around – or were they all different Santas, like there was more than one of them?’

I could see him processing this. ‘They were… different, I think,’ he admitted.

‘A-HA!’ I said, leaping to my feet, and rhythmically slapping him about his cheeks. ‘IN YOUR FACE, YOU GULLIBLE LOSER! THAT’S IT! THAT’S BLOWN THIS CASE WIDE OPEN! HOW DO YOU FEEL NOW, YOU DUPE? YOU DORK? YOU HOPELESS MORON?’

OK, I didn’t say that. I’m not a complete monster. What I said was: ‘Is there only one Santa in the world, do you think? One real Santa?’

He squidged up his mouth in thought. ‘Yes,’ he said earnestly.

Time to wave your cigar, Columbo. ‘So if only one of the three Santas you met this year was the real Santa… then what are the other two?’

‘Robots,’ he said, without any hesitation, and with considerable authority.

So much for Columbo. All credit to him, that’s a bloody brilliant answer. It’s just a shame his quick mind and powerful imagination has to be employed in the service of a vast conspiracy perpetuated annually by millions of quasi-Stalinist Santanistas [And, yes, I am tremendous fun at parties].

‘Do you still not believe in Santa, daddy?’

He looked like a little puppy dog, and I suddenly felt like an angry miser with my foot drawn back for a kick. Now that the Santa myth was entrenched in his psyche – thanks to the endless reinforcement of it by everyone around him – his happiness was indivisible from its shape. I held his hopes and dreams in my hands. My truth – the actual, literal truth – would only make him cry now, even though he’d already heard it from me during previous discussions on the topic. The lie’s roots were now too deep to be extracted without killing the host.

‘I’m still not convinced he exists,’ I told him, softening my stance in order to preserve it, all while taking care not to break his tiny little heart. You bloody monsters. I wasn’t done with this line of reasoning yet, though. I still entertained hopes of helping him to a breakthrough; hand him the key to cast off the shackles himself.

I stroked my chin. ‘What do you think Santa does for the rest of the year when he isn’t out delivering presents?’

‘Well, he tells the elves to get things ready.’

Ah, that’s healthy, isn’t it? In Jack’s eyes Santa is some Victorian-era factory owner, cracking the whip to get those marginalised ethnics working their tiny green butts off. I shook my head. ‘But that won’t take up too much of his time.  What does he do all the rest of the time? The other eleven months of his year?’

Jack batted my question back like it was a slow-moving ping-pong ball. ‘He just sits on his bum. On a chair.’

I had to run with this. Best case scenario, I kill Santa. Worst case scenario, I coax some laughs from that little mouth of his. Hopefully both. ‘So Santa’s got magical powers. He can travel all over the world in one night, delivering hundreds of millions of presents, but he doesn’t use that power the rest of the year? Like, to stop robberies? Or to help put out fires? “SANTA, HELP ME, I’M BURNING!” “Sorry, son, I’m too busy just sitting in my chair.”’

Jack laughed. ‘No. He just sits there.’

‘That lazy fat git.’

Jack laughed again.

‘”SANTA, HELP ME, MY SHOP IS BEING ROBBED!” “Bugger off, it’s June! Can’t you see I’m sitting in my chair, for Christ sake?’”

I left Jack with the imprint of a kiss on his forehead, and a room ricocheting with giggles. Success. Just as long as he stayed asleep now.

There are limits to this whimsy lark.

A little while later I was in my own bed watching TV. This is still something of a novelty, as we only became a two-TV household relatively recently. Jack appeared at the doorway revealing first a foot, then a shoulder, and finishing off with the big reveal of his bed-mussed head.

‘Daddy,’ he said, his face downcast. ‘I keep trying to get to sleep, but I keep thinking of zombies, and I don’t want to go to sleep because then I’ll dream of zombies.’

I paused the TV. I was watching Vikings. Probably best not to add rape and decapitation to his list of nightmares. He watched me for a moment or two, wondering if I was going to order him back to his bed or make room next to me. I smiled.

At times like this I always think about the episode of Cracker where Fitz delivers his mother’s eulogy. He tearfully recounts how as children he and his brother crept up to their living room to watch a boxing match on TV through a crack in the door. Long past their bedtime, Fitz somehow just knew if he pushed open the door his mother would let them both into the warmth of the room to watch the match with them. Fitz’s brother later tells him that he had no interest in the boxing match. He’d only wanted to watch his mum and dad.

‘Come here,’ I said to Jack. All thoughts of zombies must have staggered from his thoughts, else they were never there to begin with, because he bounded over to my side of the bed with a massive grin on his face. I budged over and let him snuggle in.

‘Zombies, huh?’ I said.

‘Every time I try to think of something nice, it turns into a zombie.’

I considered it for a moment. ‘Well have you tried thinking of something that’s a zombie first and then turning it into something nice?’

He looked up at the ceiling and a little smile appeared on his face.

‘It’s your brain. You tell it what to think, not the other way around.’

He seemed happy with this.

‘Hey,’ I said, tousling his head. ‘Do you think there’s a little zombie boy out there somewhere creeping into his dad’s bed because he woke up having a nightmare about a normal little boy?’

I could feel Jack’s grin creeping against my bicep. He fell asleep soon after, just as his little brother burst into the room, eyes aflame, hair a mess. He fell asleep on the other bicep.

I didn’t press play on the TV for a long time afterward. I had no need of it. All I wanted to do was watch my two boys. While I still could.

Time is precious.

Ten More Things I’ve Learned as a Dad (2019)

^^^ That’s not me, by the way. I’m a lot less handsome than that.

Anyway, without any further ado, welcome to the sequel to my 2017 blog ’12 Things I’ve Learned as a Dad’.

Supermarkets can be the site of your greatest successes, and your greatest defeats

Supermarkets can morph from ethereal paradises into branded hell-scapes in the blink of an eye. Lots of things can influence this: your children’s mood and tiredness; their sugar intake; the ascendancy of Jupiter in Mars; black magic; the Hong Kong technology markets; how much caffeine/codeine/cocaine/morphine you’ve had in the past 24-hours, and how many times that day you’ve found yourself fantasising about jumping into a Ferrari and then immediately driving off a cliff.

What contrasts. One visit, you could be wheeling your children up and down the aisles like something out of ‘Well-Behaved Victorian Family Monthly’. They’ll be helping you put things in the trolley while sticking close to it, flanking it like undertakers accompanying a hearse. They’ll be smiling beatifically at old ladies and saying things like, ‘Mother, I do hope you’ll permit me to help fold all the washing tonight.’ Text-book.

The next visit, your kids are like Gremlins who’ve been fed after midnight. You’ll be trailing a Godzilla’s tail of destruction behind you as they duel their way up and down the aisles like Sith Lords armed with French baguettes instead of light sabres. They’ll be running for the exit like Olympic sprinters (necessitating a dangerous, high-speed chase throughout the supermarket); they’ll be jumping out at old ladies from behind off-brand boxes of Bran Flakes; throwing down police stingers to immobilise people’s trolleys; wearing raw chickens as hats; substituting live grenades for kiwi fruits in the fruit aisle; staging riots and taking people hostages. NEVER take more than one kid to the supermarket on your own. EVER. Unless you’ve got a ready supply of analgesics or hallucinogens. Because you have a lot of weapons in your parenting arsenal, but out in public, there’s one thing you don’t have, which leads us very neatly into the next ‘Thing I’ve Learned’…

Your kids know you can’t use your ‘smash glass in case of emergency’ voice in public

My wife and I have never, and would never, strike our children, ostensibly because we’re not cunts, but that doesn’t mean that our house swells with the sounds of holy silence. Sometimes we have to shout. Sometimes we don’t have to shout, but we do it anyway, because we’re over-tired, because we’re human, because our sanity’s been worn down to a nub through having to ask the kids to put their socks on seventy-five-thousand times when we’re already half-an-hour late for something.

Shouting is always – well, usually – a last resort, though. You don’t want to use it so often that it either replaces smacking as a cruel and debilitating psychological punishment or loses its short-term effectiveness. Once that seal’s broken, though, it’s hard to put the red-faced genie back in the bottle. Especially since the genie might smash the bottle and attempt to stab you with the broken end.

But there’s a particular shout that all parents have: the ‘I Mean Business’ voice; the ‘Shit Just Got Real’ voice. It’s a shout that doesn’t last long, and need only be deployed once. It’s kind of like Jesse Custer’s Genesis power in Preacher. One boom, one screech, and the kids’ blood freezes in their veins, and they petrify like statues.

And you can’t use it in public. Your kids know this. Well, you COULD use it in public, but you’d look like a maniac, or the sort of person who beats and body-slams children. So you do the only other thing you can: grit your teeth into a smile and issue vague threats at your children in a high-pitched, passive-aggressive tone of voice, while occasionally turning to shoot an ‘aw shucks’ shrug at watching strangers, thinking to yourself: ‘I’m going to kill these little fuckers when we get home.’

Say it again, Sam

There are many aphorisms and clichés that sum up the experience of parenting, but there’s one that towers above all the others. No, it isn’t “F*** this, I’m going to max out my credit card and book a one-way trip to Mexico”. Good guess, though. It’s: “You can say that again!”

Because you can. You can say that again. You can say that again about 40,000 times at a bare minimum. And not just some things. All things. Every thing.

Being a parent makes you feel like a robot with its dial endlessly alternating between ‘emotionally dead’ and ‘rage’, and its speech circuits stuck on repeat. Or the composer of the world’s worst, most repetitive rave song – 2 Unlimited for the next generation: ‘Put, put. Put put put put. Put put put put. Put put PUT YOUR PANTS ON!’

Don’t fear a din

When it comes to kids, the loudness of the noise they make is actually in inverse proportion to the size of the calamity that noise signifies. I’ll explain. When I’m downstairs in the living room I can sometimes hear a noise coming from my kids’ room above me that sounds like Thor and Godzilla wrestling in the heart of a neutron bomb. I’ll immediately dash upstairs in a fit of fear and fury, but when I arrive at their doorway, I’ll find that not a single thing is out of place. The room is perfect, save for a toy box that has been turned at a forty-five degree angle towards the window. Both kids are happy and unscathed. They turn to look at me like I’m Chicken Licken after licking eleven tabs of acid. A worry-wart. A nutcase.

The time to worry, I’ve learned, is when it’s deathly quiet up there. Silence means that they’re up to something. Something awful. Young kids can barely concentrate on a single toy or a task for more than a few moments at a time (unless they’re being hypnotised by our good old pal, the TV). Just about the only thing that can focus their minds is evil. Pure, unwashed evil.

So if you find yourself momentarily apart from your kids enjoying a few rare moments of peace, and you can hear nothing from the room in which they’re playing, get the fuck up there without delay. Run. Sprint. Teleport if you can. You’re about to be greeted by a rich cavalcade of danger and debauchery, the likes of which even the ferryman on the banks of the River Styx has never seen: the cat wearing lipstick; an ungodly amount of tampons glued to the ceiling; a ten-foot blue peeing willy painted onto the wall accompanied by the word BOOB in blood-red nail varnish; a duffel bag filled with unmarked fifties; a human turd sprinkled with sequins; a cow marrying a goat in an unofficial ceremony in your bedroom; a dead shark (also sprinkled with sequins); and a working prison complex made entirely out of wooden blocks and cardboard boxes housing some of the worst serial killers this country has ever seen.

Silence is your enemy.

Kids are weirdos

My kids often use me as a climbing frame, usually with little warning or provocation. I only have to bend down to pick up a plate or squat down to tie my shoelaces and there’s a two-person stampede up my spine and across my head, the pair of them swinging off my neck like monkeys.

A few weeks ago, one of my eldest’s mighty gymnastic leaps onto my torso failed, and he accidentally kicked me in the balls. As I cautioned him about the delicacy of the flesh sacks it’s our burden to bear and the care that must be taken around them, my two-year old, who was standing next to us, suddenly shouted out: ‘LIKE THIS?’ before proceeding to whip his trousers down to his ankles and shuffle around the room screaming, ‘I’m an old man, I’m an old man!’ The eldest kid responded by laughing, and slapping his own face with both hands.

Yes, kids are weirdos. And, no, I don’t need a DNA test to prove their lineage.

Food, not so glorious food: kids are fussy

Kids have the same fickle, mercurial relationship with food as Roman emperors did with gladiators. A favourite can quickly get the thumbs down for absolutely no reason at all, and you could find the fires and fury of hell thrown in your face for daring to advocate it in the first place.

Kids are insane. A child could eat potatoes, and only potatoes, every day for six weeks while wearing a T-shirt that says ‘I LOVE POTATOES’; they could sleep with potatoes instead of teddy bears; compose sonnets, odes and epic poems to the potato; they could even lobby to have their name legally changed to Kid Who Things Potatoes are the Greatest, and you still might put a plate of potatoes down in front of them at dinner time to find those potatoes come soaring at your head accompanied by the scream of: ‘POTATOES? WHAT GAVE YOU THE IDEA THAT I LIKED TO EAT SWOLLEN GROUND-TUMOURS? GET THEM OUT OF MY BLOODY SIGHT!’

I’ve witnessed my 2-year-old violently changing his mind about his own choice of breakfast cereal literally within seconds. Cheerios he said. You’re sure, I asked? Yes, he said. Positive? I asked. Yep, he said. Absolutely water-tight on the cereal front there? I asked. Uh-huh, he replied. Cool, I said. Here’s some Cheerios.

And then there was some Cheerios all over the living room table. ‘I WANT CHOCOLATE HOOPS!’

It’s madness incarnate. I’ve always found it funny that a kid can go off eating a particular kind of meat, plant, vegetable, fruit or pulse, but never seems to lose the taste for crisps or chocolate. You’d never hear them exclaiming: ‘A MILKY WAY?! JESUS CHRIST, DO I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING MILKY WAY KIND OF A KID TO YOU? WHERE DO THEY GET THESE PEOPLE?’

Sleep is not a foregone conclusion

The pattern to keep in mind when thinking about your own children’s sleeping patterns is the kind of pattern made by a spider that’s trying to make a web while off its tits on a cocktail of sulph and crack. The end result is less a web and more a Dr’s signature scribbled on the back of a spinning washing machine during an earthquake. By all means try to discern shape and meaning in that pattern, but be prepared for that sulphed-up spider to leap from one of the 957 points of its web and sink its fangs into each of your eyes.

Right. Hang on just a second. [disengages ludicrous analogy mode]

Maybe you’re one of those people whose child sleeps all the way through the night without rouse or rancour from the very first day of its life, and if you’re one of those people then I hate you and wish you an agonising death, ideally involving mentally-deranged ostriches with PTSD. My advice to you is to stop reading this amusing article immediately and proceed directly to ‘Big Malky’s Ostrich Death Arena’ just off the M8 at Cumbernauld. See how long you can bury your head in the sand before your arse is kicked off by seventeen angry flightless birds.

For the rest of you mere mortals, you need to know that lack of sleep – or a torturous and broken drip-feed of sleep – isn’t something that’s necessarily confined to the first year or so of your child’s life.

You could be a caffeine-infused wreck – more eyelid than human – for anything up to five years. It’s worse if you have two or more children. You could very well have one child who sleeps through the night, but any gain in hours spent blissfully unconscious garnered from that cherubic child could be wiped out by the other, or others. My kids are 5 and (almost) 3 now. We co-slept with both of them when they were babies, which was beautiful and magical and reassuring, but the co-sleeping, once started, never ends. Even though both boys go to sleep in their own beds in their own room, I still wake up every morning with seven-eighths of my body dangling from the edge of the bed, and a child’s foot up my nose. And our 3-year-old still wakes up at least once through the night, usually to have a good cry to himself.

We know the feeling.

If you’ve got a partner, hug them tight

None of us parent in a vacuum. We bring our own tiredness, moods, worries, hurries and anxieties to the job. Great. So do our kids.

Their little brains are still growing and changing, overloading their minds and bodies with impulses, emotions and information-flows they aren’t yet equipped to process. They feel things, but they don’t often understand why they feel them, or know how to deal with those feelings. This broth of feelings, this contest of emotions, is a recipe for mental breakdown, depending upon what ingredients are in the mix at any one moment.

That broth can bubble over at any moment. You can wake up in the morning, skip down the stairs and greet your children with a sunny smile, have that undiluted love beamed right back at you, wrap your arms around them and squeeze them tight, and bound over to the breakfast table ready to start the day with a clear head and an open heart, but within three minutes you could be balled up on the floor smashing it with your fists and wailing like a bereaved Middle Eastern mother, as fire and rubble and regret erupt all around you.

There’ll be one kid in the corner covered in milk and wallpaper paste screaming ‘NOOOOOOOO’, while the other one’s on the table sacrificing a goat while aggressively chanting ‘IMHOTEP! IMHOTEP’ over and over. ‘Why?’ you sob, as a swirling inter-dimensional portal opens up next to you and demons crawl out and start eating the house. ‘Why??….’

Ten minutes later you’ll all be under a blanket on the couch cuddling and eating crisps, watching Paw Patrol, and the demons will be complaining because they’ve seen that one eighty-five times before.

I’ve often came home from work at lunchtime to find my wife staring through a wall, with the ashen, dead-eyed countenance of a woman who’s just witnessed a multiple murder – or else is planning one.

Frayed and frazzled nerves, especially when shared and subjected to the same child-shaped stresses, make arguments more likely by a factor of ninety-one… THOUSAND MILLION. While stress-fights are difficult to avoid, I’ve learned that it’s best to try. Just hug them. That’s the best thing to do. Hug them and have them hug you back. Hold each other. Close your eyes tight and hope for the best.

If you’re raising kids alone, then hug yourself. In fact, give yourself a medal, you brave, mental bastards.

An unhealthy obsession with serial killers comes in handy

I’ve long been fascinated by serial killers and violent criminals. I’ve read scores upon scores of books about them, watched countless interviews with convicted wrong-uns on YouTube, and devoured a whack of drama series and documentaries on the subject. I was a fan of sick, murderous bastards long before Netflix made it fashionable. As a consequence I feel I’m armed with enough specialist knowledge to spot the early warning signs of having a psychopath on my hands.

When he was three, Ted Bundy surrounded a sleeping female relative with sharp knives, all pointed towards her body. It was a most unsubtle augur of the young man’s future hobbies. The worst my wife and I have woken up to is a cough in the eye, or a shat bed, so we’ve already aced the Bundy Test.

We’ve always had pets, too, and in a house with trainee serial killers, the pets are the first to go. Our current cats, then, are rather like pit canaries. Mercifully, both boys are very loving and gentle with our furry lodgers, beyond the very occasional bit of monster-roaring in their direction, so that’s another test passed. Phew. And we haven’t yet found the disembodied head of a hitch-hiker in our fridge, so that’s also reassuring.

Keeping an eye on those matches, though.

Despite all the headaches, heartaches and lack of sleep, having kids is still the best thing in the entire world

It really is. And I think that speaks for itself. My kids are absolutely bloody fantastic, and they make me smile and cry with happiness, and beam with love and pride, more times a week than I could count. It makes all the murderous rage worth it.

Co-sleeping Kids 2: The Sleepquel

That's a really cute picture, but either those two people have the tallest baby in the world, or that child's going to suffocate!

That’s a really cute picture, but either those two people have the tallest baby in the world, or that child’s going to suffocate!

Baby number two is on its way this November. Many of you may remember that my partner and I were poised to embark on a mission to encourage our two-year-old son, with whom we co-sleep, to sleep in his own room ahead of his brother’s arrival. You can read all about that, and how we felt about it, here.

Well, it’s taken many months of patience, tenacity and tough-love, but I can report – with just over a month to go – that our mission has been… a complete and utter failure. We still wake up, each and every morning, with that smiling, tuft-headed little creature lying right there next to us, smiling over at us and issuing a few foul-breathed good mornings before ordering us out of bed. We tried, people, we really, really tried.

Prior to, and during, the transition, we played it perfectly, doing everything by the unofficial child-rearing handbook: we bought him bedsheets and duvet covers emblazoned with things that he loved (in this case Thomas the Tank Engine), and made a big deal of how awesome his room was, and how lucky he was to be snoozing in his very own big-boy bed. We became like a couple of drug-addled children’s TV presenters – the Krankies on crack, the Chuckle Brothers on ching, the Singing Kettle on ketamine – with eyes as wide as our maniac fixed smiles, a pair of howling lunatics striding and emoting our way around his bedroom.

“OH, THIS IS A BUH-RILL-IANT BEDROOM, MUMMY, I WISH I COULD SLEEP IN A BEDROOM LIKE THIS.”

“OH, YES, DADDY, ISN’T IT FAN-TASTIC? IS THAT… IT CAN’T BE… IS THAT THOMAS THE TANK ENGINE?”

“OH YES, YES I THINK IT IS! THIS IS A-MAZING! THIS IS LITERALLY THE BEST THING THAT’S EVER HAPPENED SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME!”

“I’M SO BLOODY JEALOUS! SHALL WE SING A SONG ABOUT IT NOW, DADDY?” “OH CAN WE, MUMMY? CAN WE?”

I’d just like to add, for the avoidance of doubt, that our son was present at the time.

chuckle

That first night, his mum crammed her pumpkin-esque pregnant belly into that tiny single-bed alongside him, and lay stroking his hair until he drifted off to sleep. Minutes later, she tip-toed through to our bedroom and whispered a cry of victory. I’m certain there was also a high-five involved.

Well that was easy, we thought. Maybe he’s going to be cool with this after all.

Sometime around 1am, the door to our bedroom swung open with the force of a fearsome gunslinger bursting into a wild-west saloon. Our son stood blinking in the beam of light cast from the hallway behind him, his hair standing up in nutty-professorial clumps. He wore a puzzled frown as he surveyed the half-dark around him, sooking sternly on his water cup. We sat up and watched him. He seemed certain there’d been an admin cock-up in the bedtime arrangements. “You surely didn’t mean to leave me behind, mum and dad. I’m not mad, just… disappointed.”

He staggered to the foot of our bed, tossed up his water cup, and quickly clambered after it, shuffling and snuggling himself into the crook of his mum’s arm. What could we do? We knew we should have picked him up and plonked him back down upon Thomas the Tank’s ever-smiling face, repeating the process hour after hour, night after night, for as long as was necessary until he’d adjusted to the new reality. But what the hell. It was a transition. This was only the first night. Let him sleep, dammit. Let him have one more night… Weekend. Just one more weekend. Okay, a week. A fortnight! Just a fortnight, mind. Oh, hell, let’s just let him have a clean month, goddamit.

And so now, every night – any time between the hours of midnight and four – that stern little face, with its crown of bed-head, struts or slinks into our room, and jumps into our bed.

future

The future??

Sometimes we hear him crying from his room, and one of us goes through to console him. Now and again we can placate him with a bonus bed-time story, during which he’ll happily drift back to sleep, but hours later he’ll always be back, creeping into our room like a tiny foggy-eyed ninja.

Sometimes a story just won’t do. More often than not, when I respond to his cries and whimpers in the late evening or dead of night, I’ll extend my arms to give him a comforting cuddle, only to find his little arms locking around my neck like clicked-in seatbelts, his legs propelled upwards by his full strength and weight to perform a similar fastening trick around my torso. “Mumma,” he’ll say, nodding and sniffing back a tear. “Okay, wee guy,” I’ll say, carting him back off to our bedroom – because I’m a big soft shite and I hate being apart from him anyway.

Because we’re enablers of the worst kind, we always leave on a dim night-light in his bedroom, and the light in the hallway; like lights on a runway guiding him to a soft landing on our bed. His stealth tactics have improved to the point where we don’t often realise he’s with us until we wake up in the morning. Either that, or our brains have adjusted to the new reality… which wasn’t really the way this was supposed to work: he was supposed to adjust to our new reality, wasn’t he?

Four weeks to go…

MORE PARENTING/PARENTHOOD ARTICLES

Co-sleeping kids: banished from the bed

Happy Father’s Day… to me?

On the horror of taking your child to hospital

A Celebration of Public Breastfeeding

Existential Nightmare at the Soft-play Warehouse

Flies, Lies and Crime-fighting Dogs

When people take pictures of your kids