Beddy-bye

I remember reading this magazine article once that said you can shave a little stress out of our life by thinking about what part of your day is most hectic and finding ways to deal with that segment of time more effectively. Wise advice, I thought. And hands-down, I would have said bedtime was my most stressful part of the day. If everything isn't timed just right, and it seldom is, one of several things can go wrong: bath time can end in a screaming fit; story time can be interrupted by Auden attacking Logan because he's still too little to pay attention. Then there are the nights when Logan doesn't feel like going to sleep, so he'll play quietly in his room for an hour or so, and then make an appearance just to show you he's thumbing his nose at you and your bedtime enforcing. And Auden still doesn't seem to understand that he can, indeed, sleep more than four or five hours at a time.

Yeah, so all of that can be pretty annoying. But tonight, it was just kind of funny. And cute. Logan went to bed, but forty-five minutes later or so, he opened his door and announced, "Hey, mom! Look!" And with a dramatic wave of his arm ("Ta-da!"), he showed me the floor of his room, which he had turned into a giant Hot Wheels parking lot. It was a perfect cube of cars packed together in crazy configurations. "Wow," I said. "That took some doing."
"Yeah," he said proudly. "Now we've got to keep Mimi and Jackson away from it. Because they'd probably just wreck it."
"OK, we'll do that."
"Yeah."
And as I was tucking him in for the second time tonight, he had to give good-night kisses. My eyes, my nose, my chin, my cheeks, my ears--just like I give him good-night kisses sometimes when I'm being silly. He giggles like a madman. So did I. "I wuv you, mom," he said.

And about three hours after I put Auden to bed, he started to cry. I'm usually really annoyed when he does this, and lately, I've been letting him cry it out a bit, but since he's battling the same lousy cold I'm battling, I soothed him back to sleep without wondering what awful thing I must have done in a past life to deserve not one, but two boys with sleep issues. And as I laid him down in his crib, I had to smile because he's been doing this thing lately--he stretches himself out on his back and folds his arms up behind his head like he's some tiny Tom Sawyer or something. And I just think that's adorable. By the way, happy 11 months old tomorrow, little guy.