Let Sleeping Girls Lie

All of us probably have a few somewhat irrational fears, particularly when it comes to parenting.  Generally, parents are much too afraid of strangers kidnapping their children, which only happens a handful of times each year in a country with tens of millions of children. [citation needed]  For me, I have always been the cut-food-into-tiny-pieces freak at our house.  No matter how many teeth our girls had, there I was cutting hot dogs into 10,000 tiny little pieces.  An average sized grape should be diced into, in my opinion, no fewer than 20 pieces before any child under the age of 7 can eat it.  If I had my way, grapes could just be a controlled substance along with alcohol and tobacco.  "Grape juice only after you've earned your Eagle, son."

Shannon has her own irrational fear, which was that the girls would stop breathing in their sleep.  So, once the girls had gone to bed (when they were smaller), she'd be in multiple times to check on them, just to make sure they're breathing.  (I, of course, was still down in the kitchen, dicing food.)  I was never quite sure why she would go check, because it's pretty unlikely that the girls had stopped breathing, and even in the event that they had, it would have needed to have happened very recently, and then, even if your timing was perfect, what could you even do?  (At least we knew they wouldn't be choking on anything!)

Well, we moved to Illinois, and the girls share a room now, which happens to be the least temperature controlled one in the house.  Our room is always the right temperature.  The girls are right across the hall way, and their room was too hot in September, and by November, it's always too cold.  No amount of vent adjusting seems to help; their room just wants to be the same temperature as it is outside - I blame the windows.  Anyway, suddenly there was a much more legitimate reason to check on the girls before we tottered off to bed - what if they get too cold?  So we'd start checking on them to make sure they hadn't kicked their blankets off (or taken off their PJs, for reasons that they can never seem to explain in the morning).  I often climb into bed after Shannon does, so I'd make one last check - at least if they were cold, I knew what to do about it.

And that is when I learned what I suspect is the real reason that Shannon has been going in all these years: to watch our girls sleep.  I think I could do it for hours.  Julia will kick off half her covers, or slide around on her bed.  Occasionally her butt will be sticking up in the air, and often she snores.  Ella, on the other hand, sleeps on her back and is generally neatly covered by her blankets.  Sometimes her arms are flopped out to either side and on occasion, she'll even have them tucked back behind her head, as if she is relaxing in a hammock on a warm summer day.  So I go in each night now, not so much worrying about keeping them warm but just to see my girls sleeping.  (In truth, some vent balancing and leaving their door open a bit has helped.)  They won't be little forever, and in just a few more years, this sort of late night lurking will be considered a massive invasion of privacy, but for now, they don't know, and they don't mind, so I go enjoy my daughters while they're quite for once, peacefully snuggled in their beds.  It's a little nightly reminder of how lucky I am to be their dad.