One night in September, Ronan refused to fall asleep.
Cait was in Spain for work. I'd been on solo-dad duty for seven days. In two more, I'd meet her in Scotland for a friend's wedding.
Ronan loved to sleep. There were times when he didn't sleep for long, but since he came home, if he was tired and had a full stomach, I'd put him down, and he was asleep. That streak ended unceremoniously.
For three hours, I tried everything in my short book of field notes. I took him out of the crib. He drank more milk. I checked his diaper. I rocked him. He calmed. I put him in the crib. He was on his stomach. I rubbed his back. He was on his back. I rubbed his stomach. He fell silent. I crept out of the room. He wailed.
With every cycle, I waited a few more minutes before reentering. Early in the evening, high on ego, convinced one more hug would do the trick, I sat downstairs in the living room to wait him out. Several hours later, I sat on the floor at the top of the stairs outside his room. Now asking an imagined deity to grant him sleep.
At 10 pm, the protest became a revolt. I opened his door and decided to hold him until he fell asleep. For thirty minutes, he wrestled and contorted in my arms. A one-man Cirque du Soleil performance. At thirty-one minutes, he was out. His legs and feet over my right shoulder. Head and shoulders over my left. His tangled arms sandwiched between me and the back of the chair. He could not have found a more uncomfortable position.
My hope that he was asleep turned into belief and then acceptance. I could move, but I didn't. It hit me that this thing, him falling asleep on me, a once-nightly tradition, was now an exception.
I sat there counting the times when it might happen again. He's two, and I fall asleep in his bed before finishing Grumpy Monkey for the eighth time. He's three, grossly sick, in bed with me and Cait. He's six, clothes covered in grass and pizza stains, asleep on my legs before the movie ends.
I felt warm drool on my shoulder.1 I placed Ronan in the crib and turned out the lights. He slept the rest of the night.
1 Not my own, although at first I wasn't so sure.