I Want You Yay With Me

Bedtime has been a challenge. I’m sure Sam does not have sole provenance over this, and a disinclination to go to bed is endemic to all boys his age. Every night we go through this exhaustive routine of stories, sips of water, wishes, milk, prayers and crying that leaves Elise and I physically and emotionally spent. Often, I want to crawl into bed right after Sam does.

Last night was good. We started reading one of our new books written by Jamie Lee Curtis in the den. This, in and of itself, is a challenge when Pete hasn’t gone to bed yet. I was lying on the floor in the den when he bit me on the big toe like a tiny piranha, crawled up in between my legs and landed on my chest. We bumped foreheads then he wrestled my eyeglasses from my face. It’s hard to read to Sam with Pete crawling all over us, wrinkling pages. This book has songs in it and I sing the songs (having no idea how to read music), much to Elise’s dismay.

After milk for both, we moved into the boy’s room. I wanted to read Clifford the Big Red Dog. Sam wanted to read a coloring book. I tried explaining to him that you couldn’t really read a coloring book since it didn’t have any words, but he insisted, so I played along, making up a Thomas the Train story to accompany the pictures he had scribbled over (though he is becoming quite the artist. He and Elise painted with watercolors for me yesterday). After a few more stories it was lights out. Sam stayed in bed, reading in the half-light seeping from the bathroom, and Pete eventually collapsed, exhausted (the kid never stops moving all day long).

I moved into the kitchen to clean up the few dishes from dinner. We had stopped at Oba, a small boutique grocery with fresh fruit and a good meat department, on the way home from work. Ironically, it was less expensive than the supermarket grocers. We had intentions of eating out, but Pete is at that age where he is too big to sleep in the bucket next to the table and too big to sit at the table and engage himself in a restrained and constructive manner. He’s a wild man! He would be good in a high chair. He’s much better than Sam was at this age eating out, sitting in a high chair, but none of the high chairs in Brazil have buckles. We’re toying with the idea of putting a belt or bungie cords in the diaper backpack to strap him into some of these contraptions that pass for high chairs. Likewise, none of the shopping carts have buckles either. In fact, few of them have seats for little kids at all. So, if I don’t have to carry Pete through the grocery store, squiggling in my arms the whole time because he wants to get down and crawl through the aisles—which, as you can probably imagine, aren’t the cleanest places to let your baby crawl—I put him in the strapless seat. If I turn away for even a second, he is standing up as though he were riding a longboard off of Diamondhead. I recall that Pete is now at that age that Sam was at when we went our road trip through Oregon and either Elise or I had to bounce him or walk with him outside every time we went out to eat, because he couldn’t sit still either. Needless to say, we didn’t try eating out last night. Instead, we took home sandwiches from Marietta’s which were awesome.

Oh…! And I almost failed to mention the biggest highlight from our outing yesterday…Sam wore his big boy underwear the whole time and didn’t pee in them once!! When we got home, we finished our dinner and Sam ate his broccoli and asked for more!! It goes without saying that someone was rewarded with some ice cream last night!

I thought everyone asleep, but a half hour later the kitchen door creaks open. It’s Sam. “I want you yay with me.” He looked up at me with those giant brown eyes, one a shade slightly more cocoa than the other.

I will use a work analogy here: Sometimes, when our government asks a foreign government to do something, the foreign government will have this knee-jerk reaction not to do what we ask, even when what we are asking might be in their best interest, just because it is the U.S. asking and just to spite us. Likewise, without thinking, sometimes I have the knee-jerk reaction of not doing something Sam wants to do. It’s not to spite him. Maybe instinctively, I think it wouldn’t be be parenting or steering or guiding or whatever if I just let him do what he wanted to do all the time when, the truth of the matter is, he doesn’t frequently get to do whatever the hell he wants to do all the time and, moreover, sometimes I deny Sam the very thing he wants to do when it is in everyone’s best interest if we do what Sam wants.

Usually, when Sam asks one of us to yay with him, we don’t. He needs to learn to go to sleep by himself. But last night I had had two glasses of wine and two glasses of wine has a tendency to dissolve my resistance.

I yayed next to him. He whispered, “We have fun day?” I responded, “We had a very fun day.” Then I said, “I love you, Punny.” “I wuv you, too, Daddy. Wuv Mom wuv Peter.” Then, he was asleep.