Something’s Come Between Us

This gem appears thanks to alert reader (and fellow toddler father) Nathaniel Tishman.

At 3 a.m., Dubsie will wake up in her room and rattle the baby gate until she gets what she wants. What she wants is to be carried to our bed, the warm cushy king bed, and installed between her parents. You’d think there’d plenty of room in king bed for two adults and a toddler.

We plop her in the the textbook position — head to headboard, foot to footboard — and offer certain inducements for staying there, such as her own little pillow and the company of her stuffed monkey, Hoho, but really the sleep acrobatics show is just beginning.

She’ll climb up over the bluff of the comforter and end up fully inverted, head somewhere down near our knees, and burrow deep into the bedding, as if dropped from a height, so in the morning only her rump is visible when I open my eyes. Other times she spoons Mummy and affectionately thrusts her head backward into Mummy’s nose, which makes Mummy hyperextend her own neck so she starts the new day with a crick.

But most often she will rotate 90 degrees, stretch herself to full length between our heads, and force us both to the edges. I often wake up with Dubsie’s skull firmly wedged beneath my cheekbone, as if to prevent any part of me from touching my wife. Meanwhile she will, in a preview of her adolescent years, kick her mother in the face.

It’s probably time for an intervention for our little interventionist.