{good} night

The boys fell asleep before me night before last. I'm a night owl and it took just a couple of days of summer for me to abandon my 6 am wakeup, to slide right back into my preferred stay-up-late-sleep-in mode. Poor Ryan doesn't get the summer off and I'm sure me slinking into bed an hour after him and flipping the lamp on so I can read into the night annoys him, even though I usually get nothing more than a huffy rolling over in response, or a pillow over his eyes and a long, knowing exhale.

This night, though, our boy had curled up beside his dad for some TV while I puttered in my office, and they'd both drifted off while watching Through the Wormhole, a Science/Discovery Channel show that plays into the curiosity they both harbor regarding space and how this crazy world works. I shuffled pillows and stuffed animals and made a pallet from our new comforter on the floor for our little bub, thinking of that word "pallet" and how my cousins and I were always content, excited even, to make one on the hard floor at my grandparents' house when we were growing up, wondering if other families use(d) that word for makeshift sleeping arrangements. I thought of its similarity to a word in a Maya Angelou essay I like: palliative. Relief without cure. To temporarily comfort. Not a permanent solution but short term relief. The way you felt when, scared by a storm or a nightmare as a child, you crawled into bed with your mom and dad or curled up on their floor. The bad dream might strike again tomorrow night, the thunder and lightning might, too, but for now, for then, you were safe.

Even with the volume down a little, I could still make out Morgan Freeman's unmistakable narration coming from the big pine armoire as I tiptoed around my room. I half-listened to him calmly pondering the deep, deep mysteries of the universe, of life and what comes after, and I pondered a few mysteries of my own...the first being how my house had gotten so embarrassingly messy just a day after the cleaning lady had visited and when we'd hardly even been home; the second being, as I lifted my little sleeper and moved him to his spot for the night, just when it was my baby boy got so tall, so lean but so heavy. He's a good sleeper (a late-to-bed-sleep-in night owl like me actually) and does fine in his room up the stairs and across the house from us, but he loves to sleep in our room when we let him. I tend to indulge him on this often, knowing already that the day will come when he won't want (or need) to make a pallet just steps away from me, remembering a cheesy but true country song whose lyrics have always stuck with me for some reason...

"Let them cry, let them giggle...let them sleep in the middle...oh, but let them be little..."