Thursday, June 30, 2016

Guerrilla Snuggling

My baby boy isn't a baby any more. Earlier this month, he turned 8. 8! I'm not sure when that happened, but the truth is undeniable: the boy before me is definitely not the sweet little guy I remember toddling around in diapers.

Obviously, as he's gotten older, our challenges have changed. Some of them (walking, feeding himself, tying his own shoes, etc.), he's mastered. Others, like bedtime battles, come and go: we have months of no problems what-so-ever, and then a sudden spate of backsliding and delaying.

One of those come-and-go challenges has been the ever evolving bed war. Not bedtime battles: bed wars. As in, Mommy's bed is better than his bed, so therefore, he wants to sleep in there. He wants to go to sleep in there. He wants to wake up in the middle of the night and climb into Mom's bed and continue sleeping there. 

This battle began round about the time he moved into a big-boy bed. At that time, he was a jungle sleeper: tossing and turning, somersaulting and ninja-kicking his way through the night. It was pretty easy for me to summon the energy to carry him back to his room, because I LIKE my kidneys, and a few months of getting kicked in them while pregnant was enough to last me several lifetimes.

As he's gotten older, he's less likely to climb into my bed in the middle of the night, but his tactics for bed-takeover have gotten sneakier. He's resorted to guerrilla snuggling. This is snuggling with the intention of getting the entire bed to himself. It starts off sweet: he snuggles up to me in the middle of the bed. This gets uncomfortable, so I shift to the side. He snuggles closer. I shift again. Closer. Shift. Closer. Shift. Until I am less than half awake and clinging to a tiny sliver of bed, with a vast ocean of available real estate on the other side of the sweetly snuggling boy.

I know our snuggling days are numbered. So it's hard to complain (much) about being snuggled right out of sleep. Although that's easier to remember when the guerrilla snuggling episodes are a few weeks behind us.

Thursday, June 9, 2016

Don't Be Sad

As part of the parenting arrangement my ex and I have, our son spends two weeks with each parent in the summer. Two weeks of boy-lessness took some getting used to, but I've gotten to a point where I can look forward to both of those occasions.

My son does, too, although sometimes I feel like it's getting harder on him the older he gets. I think what it really is, however, is he's better able to articulate how much he misses the other parent.

I typically get a call about halfway through his dad's time from a boy sadly telling me how much he misses me. I was hoping that this year would be different because, despite the leading-up-to-the-day assertions of how much he'd miss me, the actual drop-off was a very "see-you-later-alligator" affair. Good start, right?

But earlier this week, I got The Call. The sad little boy, telling me how much he misses me. And in trying to cheer him up and make him feel better, I told him something I now regret: "Don't be sad."

No, I don't want him to be sad. But I do want him to know it's OK to *be* sad: that sad (or mad or happy or silly) are all emotions it's OK to feel and telling someone he trusts about those feelings is good and right. I don't want him to ever think he has to hide his emotions from me. 

So now I just have to try to figure out how to work that into a conversation once he comes home!