When we moved into this house three years ago we separated Kit and Jack’s shared nursery, setting up their cribs in two different bedrooms. We painted the walls in Kit’s room pink to match the chocolate-brown and pink toile bedding and curtains that decorated the guest room in our old home, and found new, coordinating sheets to outfit Kit’s crib. Jack’s walls were painted the same color as a glass of milk, and the bedding we had made for the twins’ original nursery followed Jack into his new room.
It made sense at the time, separating these toddlers. One napped well and the other didn’t. Sometimes at night a wakeful baby would disturb the slumbering one. This new home was a chance at a course correction, we reasoned. In separate rooms the kids will have an opportunity for a better night’s sleep. And maybe if they do, we will, too.
The new sleeping arrangements worked well for while. Kit and Jack transitioned from their cribs into beds, and somewhere along the line John and I stopped fretting over the possibility of restless nights. But then Jack discovered that he could get out of his bed without our help and just like that John and I found ourselves sharing our bed with our littlest boy every night.
We tried marching Jack back to his own room when we found him in our bed. When that didn’t work we tried shutting Jack’s bedroom door and sitting outside it until he fell asleep again. Some nights Jack would position himself flat against the other side of the door and bang his fists and scream through hulking, tearful sighs. We tried everything we could think of to make Jack stay in his own bed at night, but he eventually wore down our resolve. In time when John and I woke during the night to find a little boy in our bed we learned to just roll over and let that boy be.
Doing as much worked well for a while. But then Jack began laying claim to more mattress space, and it wasn’t uncommon to catch a heel or an elbow across your nose or in an eye socket during the night. Something had to change, John and I decided.
One of the ladies with whom I work out at the gym suggested I put a blanket and pillow on the floor against my side of the bed and tell Jack that he was welcome to come into my bedroom during the night, but that if he did he had to sleep on the floor. So I took her advice and that approach worked well for a long, long time. Until it eventually didn’t when Jack decided he’d rather share my pillow than the one I’d laid out for him on the floor and suddenly John and I were back where we began.
It wasn’t much fun, fighting with Jack every night. No one was sleeping well and neither John, Jack nor I knew how to arrive at a workable peace. There were noises in Jack’s room, he insisted. There was something outside, or something in the attic, and he didn’t want to be alone where this something could easily get him. We were unable to convince him otherwise. We didn’t know what to do.
“Maybe Jack could sleep with me in my room until he’s grown up,” Kit suggested one afternoon on our way home from school. She said as much with a shrug, her palms held up toward the sky. I squinted at her in the rearview mirror as I turned her suggestion over in my head.
That night John and I tucked the twins’ beneath Kit’s comforter. Kit rested her head on a pillow placed at the top of her mattress, and Jack rested his on a pillow propped up against the footboard. Both kids slept soundlessly all night.
A couple weeks later we spent a Saturday afternoon rearranging Kit and Jack’s bedrooms. Both beds and dressers didn’t fit in Jack’s room, so John and I carried everything we’d just moved one way back down the hall to Kit’s room. I found new bedding to cover their beds, and ordered matching curtains for their window. The pink curtains were hung in Jack’s old room, and the only painter we’ve ever hired, the same one who painted Kit and Jack’s original nursery, came and painted Jack’s old room pink and the kids’ new room the same color as a glass of milk.
And we all slept through the night. For a little while, at least, until one night I awoke to find a little boy sharing my pillow. Only this time it wasn’t Jack. It was Archie and no matter what John and I did, nor no matter what we do, when morning comes Archie is always tucked against one of our backs, an arm flung across a neck, his hot breath blowing into an ear.
We aren’t sleeping well, John and I, but it’s hard to complain about that when every morning we’re greeted this way: “Good morning, Mommy. Good morning, Daddy. What are we going to do today?” Archie’s chipper outlook always makes me smile, and usually makes me laugh, too. And there’s a part of me that doesn’t mind it so much when I’m the one who carries Archie down our dark hallway and down our dimly-light steps before dawn because that means I get to drink my coffee in the blue-tinted flicker of the television set and watch Archie have at the toys Kit and Jack normally sequester for themselves.
This morning Archie stood in front of the blackboard side of the easel Santa left Kit for Christmas and started my morning off right. “Welcome to our great school!” he said enthusiastically. “Today is Wednesday and it’s cold outside. Very, very cold,” he continued, shivering theatrically for effect. That’s when he turned toward the blackboard and placed the piece of chalk he was pinching between his fingers against the alphabet printed across the top of the slate. “Today we’re going to learn our abc’s. Aaaaaa…. Bbbbbb…” and he continued on down the alphabet until he reached the end.
