Watermelon Hands

When I was having difficulty getting my daughter to sleep, I did what nearly every other modern mom does:  I took to the internet.  Everything I read suggested all different kinds of techniques, but one theme rang true, and that was the ritual.  It seemed that if you followed a set ritual, something that was designed to calm your child down and prepare her for bed, nighttime would move a lot smoother and your child would be more susceptible to sleep.

Some of the rituals that families had were long-winded productions that ran night after night like a perfectly-scripted play that closed the curtain at exactly the same time every evening.  They consisted of several acts that dragged on for hours, and most of these families included a warm bath (with some kind of highly-advertised lavender soap marketed as a miracle sleep aid), songs, stories - an entire repertoire of calming activities that were to run immediately after dinner.

There's no way I could pull something like that off.  The planning and the execution must be exact, and I'm too carefree with my time to even joke about considering something so demanding.  

We never really had a ritual so much as we had bedtime techniques instead.  Evelyn and I would rock in the glider in the corner of her nursery, window open if the weather allowed it, listening to the sounds of the night as I sang softly to her until she fell asleep.  Then our rocking chair broke. 

It seemed that every time we got into some kind of ritual, the figurative rocking chair would break and we would be forced to improvise.  I won't bore you with all the details of every single ritual that has come and gone, but needless to say, we finally found one that we all as a family can live with.

Family Fruit Time

At 7:30 p.m., Dada changes Evelyn's diaper and puts her in her pajamas as I prepare her warm milk (an essential part of our ritual, of course).  Then, as her milk is sitting in a mug of hot water to slowly take the chill of the fridge off, we stand around the kitchen or sit at the bar and eat fruit together.

We giggle.  We feed each other.  We dribble juice down our chins.  It runs contrary to almost everything I've read about infant and toddler sleep:  Not only are we giving her sugar before bed, but we're also engaging her in a stimulating activity.  And yet she still drinks her milk a half hour later and is asleep by 8:30 p.m. every night.

The past two nights, we have been indulging in watermelon.  Sitting in her Dada's lap at the bar, she would slap her little hands on the granite in anticipation of each juicy bite as I stabbed into the pink fruit with a fork and presented it to her.  Sometimes, she would lean forward with her little mouth open like a baby bird and snatch the bite directly off the fork; other times, she would carefully pull it off the fork with gentle little fingers, sucking as much juice out as she could before finally popping the whole piece in her mouth.  

Tonight as we lay in bed together, she rolled toward me and pressed her little face up against mine, forehead to forehead, nose to nose.  Just before she fell asleep, she brought a little hand up to my face and cupped my chin.  It smelled like watermelon.

This too shall pass...

This ritual started one night when I dropped an apple and decided it had to be eaten before it sat around on the counter bruising up.  Jon-Michael was holding Evie and I was busy trying to eat as much of the crunchy skin off the apple as I could so she could tear at the white flesh with her little teeth.  We all ended up eating the apple together, standing there in the kitchen and laughing and just enjoying a moment of sweet simplicity together.

I know it will end, like all other rituals, to be replaced by something new.  Our son will be born soon, and the job of tackling a toddler ritual with a newborn ritual will begin, and togetherness in the kitchen around a piece of fruit probably won't be a possibility anymore.  I'm going to soak it up as much as I can, though.  Juicy, sticky chins and all.