Good Nights

Good Nights…parenting is full of them. They sometimes come in short to the bad night, sometimes break even….but they have the power to make those bad nights seem nearly non-existent. Tonight was one such night. Just me and Sammy having some mommy/daughter time which, truth be told, is my favorite time. We started our evening out by snuggling into the same chair with a juice box (for her, not me) and some crackers. While she sat content, avidly watching The Cat in the Hat, I checked my email, cleaned out inboxes, then started in on supper. In the time it took to bake…or…cook, whatever…the chicken (which…oops, I did upside down) we snuggled through the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. Yes…I know its March but sometimes the girl wants what she wants and truth be told, I do so love that special.

After a very pleasant supper, it was bath time, complete with a phone call to Grandma and Grandpa that she SAID she wanted to make but when the phone started ringing and I told her that she had to answer it she told me, quite matter-of-factly “I’m too busy, mommy.”

Her too busy consisted of pouring water from a small bottle into a large bucket.  My dad found this hilarious. She did tell them both hello and goodbye and that she loved them. Then out of the bathtub with her usual “Mommy, my feets are cold!!” She’s very conscious of her feet when they’re cold. So much so that I had to wrap them when she was standing on her little stool brushing her teeth.

After this…BREAKTHROUGH!!! I shouldn’t be bragging. I feel that, with as touch and go the whole potty training thing has been after the initial excitement wore off, I may just be jinxing myself on this. Let’s pray that I’m not. But, by convincing her that she could wear her pretty “Dora panties” to bed if she used her potty then waiting patiently while she danced around the bathroom, patience paid off and she dashed to her potty to use it! Many hugs and happy dances were exchanged after this.

She even scored herself one more than her customary five bed-time books for bed. This is, by far, my favorite time of the evening. Though, more often than not, the books are the same ones from the previous evening, her excitement over what takes place in the course of a few pages never wavers. She points out the same things, asks the same questions, and always with the same amount of zest and childish delight. It’s refreshing to see such untouched innocence, such wonder at something as simple as a mouse creating his own paw-prints in the snow.

And then she gets the one thing that has recently become part of our bed time routine. It’s going to be the most difficult one to break and I probably shouldn’t have given in to my exhaustion one evening about two months ago to lay down beside her. But alas, I did. And now, after saying prayers, after a game of “who will shut out the lights” and after Sammy scampers her way into her bed and makes herself comfortable…I hear the same words every night. “Mommy, you lay with me?”

How could one possibly turn down such a simple request from such a tiny, precious daughter? Its a few minutes out of my day…unless I fall asleep (which I have) then it usually becomes thirty minutes or more. Dustin once had to be the one pulling bedtime duty and ended up sleeping nearly two hours beside her in a bed that was far too small for his tall frame. It may have, aside from their bedtime game of hug tag, been the cutest thing I’ve seen as far as husbands and baby girl’s go.

So we laid down, I rubbed her back for a bit, she traced my cheeks and whispered strange non-sense words to me that I couldn’t really understand aside from “that’s better, Mommy.” And to bed she went!

A perfect evening.